The Soldier

Tonight while Notre Dame is burning
French people gather around it and softly sing Ave Maria
And the whole world cries
And my mind drifts back to long ago

When I was 20 years old, I went into the service
A boy from Staten Island in the army corps of engineers
And I got shipped off to sunny Honolulu
And I trained and played golf every day in sunny Honolulu
And my future brother-in-law from the Bronx was in Patton's army in Europe
Two boys from the big city so far away from home

One day, I was playing golf in Honolulu
When an airplane came and it picked us up and I didn't know where we were going
And it took us to an island called Iwo Jima
And I set up communication lines for the soldiers there on Iwo Jima
We'd already taken the island, so I didn't see much fighting
Soon I was running short of things to do on Iwo Jima

One night, I was wandering around and I walked into a dark cave
And my eyes water as I tell this story to my children, and my grandchildren, and my great-grandchildren
But I found a dead Japanese soldier lying there
And I poked him, and he was dead, and I looked at him
And I found a picture in his shirt pocket of a young child
And I put it back in his shirt pocket, and I wept
And I took his hand grenade, and an unexploded shell, and I left

And I took the shell back to the Quonset hut, and when no one was around
I emptied out all of the gunpowder
And later, I brought that shell back home, back when people used to smoke
People used it for an ashtray

And when the war was over, I married my soldier friend from the Bronx's sister
We moved into a little house near where I grew up on Staten Island
And every week, we had milk and beer delivered to our front door
We had five children, one right after the other
And they played in the yard, and in the summers we went up to the lake
And in August, we would go back home to Staten Island

And our oldest daughter had a baby when she was just 18
And then she got sick, and she died when she was 27, and nothing was ever the same
But she left behind her 8-year-old daughter
So my wife and I, we adopted this girl and we raised her
A quiet little girl in a world of old people

We took her to the Nutcracker and the Catholic Church and we played lots of cards
And she dyed her hair pink in the 8th grade, but we dyed it back the next day
And the fella singing this song is her husband now, and he idolizes me for some reason

And these days, in the summers, he leaves his daughters at the lake with us
And they garden with me, and I sing soldier songs to them when they go to bed
While he's home in New York trying to write funny songs for TV commercials

Last summer at my 96th birthday in August
I looked at my children holding their children, and their children's children
I sipped a cold beer, and ate peanuts on the porch with my brother-in-law
We talked about old friends and gardening and the wives we'd both lost
And my old heart was overcome with both joy and sadness