A Song for Forgotten Heroes

To listen to the song
click below

While on tour, especially in large cities, I would often perform free concerts at Veteran’s Administration hospitals on my nights off. I met a Viet Nam War veteran at the Boston VA hospital at one of these concerts and was inspired to write a song about him and the many other disabled Viet Nam vets I’d met in other hospitals. I first recorded this song in concert a few years later. The audience was stunned and silent. This was an appropriate response. It is a tragedy that such a disturbing song as this needed to be written.

I’m your bright young man who went to war
As our fathers have done before
To fight for honor and freedom
And I did what I was told
And I gave of my body, and I gave of my mind
But tell me what do I have left, now that they’ve taken my soul?

I fought your war with my arms
I fought your war with my legs
I can’t say it was in my soul
But I left many a dead man cold

Now you’ll find me on the welfare line
My eyes stare down to the ground
For how many jobs can I apply?
We have no work they say

And I never hung out on the street before
Always had something to do
For these holes in my arms I’ve paid so
With my health and wealth and shame

Will you come to see me at the hospital?
Come anytime, I’m always there
Don’t feel funny if I don’t look the same
I don’t think the same no more
What will I do without my arms
What will I do without my legs
And I cannot see how this can fit
Into God’s plan

What happened to the boy who went to war?
Where’s the honor and freedom now?
And what about the men we left behind?
It’s too late to help them now
And I cry so much these days
And I don’t always know what for
But nothing has changed my life so much
Since I went away to war