It was during my first year at this school that I was asked to write a song for the Veteran's Day program, which was inspiring. The performance was a disaster because the sound system, which was not great to begin with, was not set properly, but we all suffered through it. With that residue, the song sort of died a natural death, but it has come back to haunt me in recent years. If you'd like to actually hear the MP3, find it here, but please beware that it's not a studio recording.
I don’t know how they did it
When the country went to war
I don’t know where they found the courage
To fight and die on distant shores
He had never been more than fifty miles
From the little old town where he lived
Till he found himself floating on the ocean
On a journey with a thousand other men
He had no way to imagine a war
With this modern weaponry
So he’d lie awake in his narrow bunk
Listening to the engines pulling on the sea
Then he stood on the deck of that transport ship
And he watched those torpedoes run
He saw two ships go down to the bottom
But he couldn’t bear to write about it to his loved ones
And when he landed on the beach in the morning
With the bullets screaming overhead
He charged that hill like he never wrote a letter
To be read in case he were dead
Living on the road in burned-out buildings
In foxholes and rivers of mud
Learn a few words of the native language
Drag your body through another field of blood
Three years later he was still alive
And they brought him back over the sea
But big parades and G.I. bills
Couldn’t make him talk about what he had seen
Women took over in the factories
Drove tractors dawn to dusk (spoken)
Healed the wounded behind the lines
Kept children’s hopes alive
Navajo talkers kept the code
While the ambulance drivers flew
Down the roads full of crater holes
To the death camps no one knew
Some walked the jungles with their hair on end
Some burned in desert sands
But they all reached out for something bigger
Than the solitary heart of a single man
So where does all this leave this generation
As we celebrate veteran’s day?
Don’t think that debt is left to history
Make your mind up to talk to a veteran today
Gerry Wass 10/15/02
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Comments: 28
And I've sent this to my son's computer and will listen next time I visit him.
I'm looking forward to it.
I understand your feelings. I taught junior high school English here for 6 months before resigning my teaching position. I had the option of saying the Pledge in the morning. I opted not to say it because the last line is a lie.
I say we ride around the mall parking lot all day with this song blasting out of a loud speaker.
Jamie--nice to meet you and I'm grateful that it moved you so.
Jessie, my friend, I appreciate your support and that it connected with your own past.
Ruth--I'm glad you enjoyed the lyrics--this was a song that came quickly, as if some veteran were working through me.
"I don't know where they found the courage..." could easily be said of any war in any time period. I think of the battle of Fredericksburg as depicted in the film, "Gods and Generals." The futility of that uphill battle must have pierced the heart of many a soldier, yet the steadiness of the Federal assault even impressed General Lee when he said, "It is good that war is so terrible, else we should grow too fond of it."
"On a journey with a thousand other men." You bring us to the origins and development of the citizen/soldier who leaves his comfortable home and is brought almost immediately to something so foreign that the learning curve is steep. He reads letters and dreams of chocolate chip cookies while traversing the wilderness of brutality in a land of deafening assault.
"He had no way to imagine a war..." Here we might recall Alexander Korda's 1936 film, "Things to Come," the H.G. Wells tale that provokes us to imaginative speculation on future issues of global conflict and the nature of man.
"Then he stood on the deck of that transport ship..." A picture of my dad on the RMS Queen Mary, right next to the third funnel. A graphic portrait that does not seem tarnished by time.
"But he couldn't bear to write about it..." A scene from Stanley Kubrick's "Paths of Glory" whereupon tragic consequences bear witness to the cruelty of war in its expansive indifference to survival.
Yet you offer a hopeful diagram in "they all reached out for something bigger," and the spoken interlude, "Healed the wounded behind the lines, kept children's hopes alive," breathes with a kind of supernatural grace of kindness far removed from carnage or coldness.
The "Navajo talkers" and "ambulance drivers" add human dimension to the drama you so vividly portray. You leave us with "something bigger than the solitary heart of a single man." You help us to see with clarity the larger dimensions of courage in the human soul, the depth of character of the veteran who has survived monumental challenges and now returns to his family, home, community and friends with greater wisdom born of war's great trials.
This is a poem of enduring value, Gerry, one my father would surely have treasured. It speaks quite deeply of things often displaced or lost-in-transit over time. And we can read it again to refresh our memory, even to re-think where we find ourselves on this Veteran's Day.
Glenn--I am overwhelmed by the depth of your comments and the way you relate my song to your own personal past. I am particulary pleased that you caught the references to those who played huge supportive roles, such as the ambulance drivers who never got military pensions because they were technically civilians. It was an enormous team effort, and you've expanded the meaning of this tribute a great deal for me. Thank you so much for your insights!
So poignant - I've spoken with people who work in VA hospitals, who talk about the WWII and other vets who are afraid to die, because they killed. Never mind that we justified the war, and that many glorified it as well. Still the souls of these vets tell them that the killing was against the laws of the soul......Don't you feel for those who have no way, no way of expressing what they went through? And they wonder why..... All of us wonder, what is it in our makeup that allows such things?
I'm interested in your other songs as well, and thank you for writing this one. It seems to have room for everyone in its stories.