Josh Ritter

Our Father's War
Came out of arrivals with something in his eyes that wasn't there And you've been waiting for him beneath the white fluorescent glare He throws his bags down, he picks you up, he's spinning you round Holding so tightly to you that you cannot even make a sound This is your favorite memory of him polished beautifully You thought about it often both reflexively and dutifully You didn't care who he was fighting or who he was fighting for Only that your father finally'd come home from your father's war Now eighteen years have passed and we're still in Afghanistan With IEDs, armored Humvees, Burger Kings, and quicksand And the folks that started up the fight are getting old and dying And it's harder to remember just why the hell we're fighting So we wrap the reasons in the flag, show films of 9/11 Every Sunday they remind us that all soldiers go to Heaven It's a Heaven for Americans, the ones who please the Lord Remember even Jesus had to fight his Father's war You meet a man you love who reminds you of your father The way he used to be before his outlook got so dark He sweeps you off your feet; carries you across the threshold Of a new life then he ships out. You are 22-years old He calls you when he can from an undisclosed location SongtexteThen something happens and he's sent home, put on medication He wakes up every night an AR-15 in his chest with your Head upon his shoulder you can hear your father's war But now laser-guided missiles beam snuff films of their immolation Fossil fuel removal, architecture runs on radiation Lines of code all stowed away deep inside a terabyte An economic serfdom is conferred upon the non-compliant You don't have to understand it all; but that's okay, nobody does It's hard for souls to comprehend the horrors they commit and thus They do their work behind a wall, behind a screen, behind a door So they don't have to see what he saw when it was your father's war So he'll finish off his tour of duty in an office park in Maryland Facilitating drone strikes in the border towns of Pakistan And this is all he's told you; it's amazing he's said anything But you've seen it on the Cable news: the hospitals and weddings And at first you think you'll be alright, he'll come home from work each evening But he's no longer all love and light; he's silent or he's seething And you love him more than anything but you've seen this all before And in every way that matters this is still your father's war This is still your father's war It's still your father's father's war And it's his father's war And his father before his father's war And this is how it's gonna be Right down through generations War improving only on its cruelties with innovation So they throw the dead upon the dead, like flowers on cut roses And prove that we can take revenge and slaughter without notice And have everything we wanted with what's left we'll wipe the floor So maybe it's just easier to fight our father's war Aus Songtexte Mania