The Soldier chords by Walter Martin
Intro 1
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Verse 1
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Tonight while Notre Dame is burning
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French people gather around
it and softly sing Ave Maria
C
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And the whole world cries
And my mind drifts back
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to long ago
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Verse 2
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When I was 20 years old,
I went into the service
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A boy from Staten Island in the
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army corps of engineers
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And I got shipped off to sunny Honolulu
And I trained and played golf every
day in sunny Honolulu
F
And my future brother-
in- law from
The Bronx was in Patton's
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army in Europe
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Two boys from the big city
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so far away from home
Verse 3
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One day, I was playing golf in Honolulu
F
When an airplane came and it picked us
Up and I didn't know where
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we were go ing
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And it took us to an island
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called Iwo Jima
And I set up communication lines for
the soldiers there on Iwo Jima
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We'd already taken the island,
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so I didn't see much fighting
G
Soon I was running short of things
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to do on Iwo Jima
Verse 4
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One night, I was wandering around
and I walked into a dark cave
F
And my eyes water as I tell
this story to my
Children, and my grandchildren,
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and my great- grandchildren
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But I found a dead Japanese
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soldier lying there
And I poked him, and he was dead,
and I looked at him
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And I found a picture in his shirt
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pocket of a young child
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And I put it back in his shirt pocket,
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and I wept
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And I took his hand grenade,
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and an unexploded shell, and I left
Verse 5
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And I took the shell back to the
Quonset hut, and when no one was around
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I emptied out all of
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the gunpowder
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And later, I brought that shell back
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Home, back when people
used to smoke
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People used it for an ashtray
Verse 6
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And when the war was over
I married my soldier friend
from the Bronx's sister
F
We moved into a little house near where
I grew up on Staten Island
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G
And every week,
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we had milk and beer delivered to our front door
We had five children,
one right after the other
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And they played in the yard,
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and in the summers we went up to the lake
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And in August,
we would go back home to Staten Island
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Verse 7
And our oldest daughter had a baby
when she was just 18
F
And then she got sick
And she died when she was 27, and
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nothing was ever the same
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But she left behind her
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8- year- old daughter
So my wife and I,
we adopted this girl and we raised her
F
C
A quiet little girl in a world of old people
Verse 8
F
We took her to the Nutcracker and the
Catholic Church and we played
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lots of cards
F
And she dyed her hair pink in the 8th
Grade, but we dyed it back
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the next day
G
And the fella singing this song is her
Husband now,
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and he idolizes me for some reason
Verse 9
C
And these days, in the summers
He leaves his daughters at the lake
with us
F
And they garden with me
And I sing soldier songs to them
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when they go to bed
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While he's home in New York trying
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To write funny songs for TV commercials
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Interlude 1
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F
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G
F
G
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Verse 10
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Last summer at my 96th birthday in August
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I looked at my children holding their
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Children, and their children's children
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I sipped a cold beer
And ate peanuts on the porch
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with my brother- in- law
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We talked about old friends and gardening
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and the wives we'd both lost
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And my old heart was overcome with both
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F
G
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joy and sadness
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F
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Outro 1
End
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G
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The Soldier
Walter Martin
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