"Bring Him Home" and Related Music

It's a little odd for me to listen closely to all the music that's out there about "praying for your soldier to survive," because there's something that's missing. I love these songs--"Bring Him Home" from Les Miserables, "Letters from War" by Mark Schultz, and the first verse of "Pray for You" by Blessid Union of Souls are all beautiful and tender and moving and make me cry every time--but there's still something missing.

I know I'm in the story those songs are trying to tell, that it encompasses me and my brother and John and Carolyn and Amy and Ashley and Kelsey and Alexis and Jacob and Emma and Caroline and Andrew and Peter and thousands more like us, but we're never mentioned in the lyrics. Not even once. I don't know what it is, but, while we're eventually present at the end of the music video for "Letters from War," in the lyrics we're not acknowledged. 

All the praying-for-your-soldier songs I've ever heard focus on the soldier's parents, never children like us who watch our own parents go off on long deployments that in some cases take them into war zones, or like my granddaddy, who at the age of ten on December 7, 1941 literally watched his own father walk into a war zone just outside their house. And I think they're missing something because of it. Not that the parents don't have a worthwhile story to tell, since they absolutely do, but that our story is not any less worthwhile. We have a different perspective, and one that really needs to be told. We are forced to grow up quickly, to get used to living in families that can go from being two-parent to single-parent in a day and back to two parents six months or a year later, and there are families out there where both parents have been deployed at once and the children had to just live with that. We have to get used to grieving very quietly for an entire life we had, everywhere that is familiar and nearly everyone we knew and often a few treasured possessions too, all at once, every year sometimes when we move, and it has to be quiet because even though we don't know if we'll ever see those people and places again, we can't get in the way of moving. And it's all hard on our parents and us at the same time.

On Memorial Day a few years ago, I began a poem about how my father missed my sixteenth birthday because the military wanted him somewhere else on that day. I never could finish that poem, but now I think there's something I have to write along similar but broader lines. And it boils down to this:

The children of those soldiers and sailors and pilots want to bring them all home safely, too.