God and The Soldier
When they ask you, don’t you just say “Oh…”
Whispering, “…I don’t know.”
Does it make you wander back before
They called us the dogs of war?
Things you saw you wish you’d never seen,
Faces that won’t ever leave your dreams,
Those who stayed back ask what was it for
—They called us the dogs of war.
God and the soldier, we adore,
In times of trouble, not before,
The danger over, the wrong righted,
God is forgotten and the soldier is slighted.
Some of us are happy like you all,
Some have their backs against the wall,
Some of us are just a paper score
—They called us the dogs of war.
God and the soldier, we adore,
In times of trouble, not before,
The danger over, the wrong righted,
God is forgotten and the soldier is slighted.
By Stephen Luster
Vietnam Veteran
25th ID, U.S. Army
Stephen writes:
I wrote this shortly after coming back from Vietnam. The title and refrain I found scrawled in pencil on my barracks wall when I was at the US Military Academy Preparatory School in 1964.
I tried to find the refrain’s source, but it appears to have anonymous authorship, and has made the rounds for many years. At any rate, I committed it to memory and it became the basis of this poem.
Joanne, thank you for writing this. Stephen is a brother-in-law of mine.
I have such a heart for the soldier. I have seen too many of these beautiful souls tossed aside and forgotten. One of my uncles was in WWI, two of my brotherinlaws in WWII, my very favorite brotherinlaw a Marine Sarg. in Korea one of the Chosen Few. When I observed through my eyes just what he experienced and what he had to silently endure before he was delivered from those horrid memories by our Loving God, I got way too close to worshiping him.