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
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 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
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 End