On Memorial Day, we honor those who have died for our country. We also think about the sacrifice of the loved ones left behind.
In their honor, the GreenBookofSongs.com® has compiled a playlist from its category of songs about Love: Love & War. Each is a story of love cut short. They are described below but not ranked — there is no way to compare the stories of soldiers who do not come home.
Three of these songs take the soldier’s point of view, in varying stages of their exit from life. The soldier in Tracy Lawrence’s “If I Don’t Make It Back” hasn’t yet gone to war, but he knows he may not return. On his last night out with friends, he tells them to ”find someone good enough for Amy / Who will love her like I would have / If I don’t make it back.” His would-be best man is left to honor those last wishes.
Tim McGraw’s “If You’re Reading This” is the voice from beyond the grave; a soldier has left a letter to be opened by his pregnant wife and his parents in the event of his death. He hopes to comfort them with his faith that in his mission and his God, and frees his wife to find love again: “There’s gonna come a day / When you move on and find someone else, and that’s okay…Know my soul is where my momma always prayed that it would go.”
It takes a close reading of David Gray’s “You’re The One I Love” (and a look at Gray’s own discussion of the song) to see the war theme, but this is a soldier’s prayer of love. As he lies dying on the battlefield, no sound other than “the bullets whispering gentle / ’mongst the new green leaves,” he thinks of his girlfriend and sends out his love: “As the tracer glides / In its graceful arc / Send a little prayer out to ya / Cross the falling dark…You’re the one I love.”
Another three songs take a woman’s point of view. In Carrie Underwood’s “Just A Dream”, a bride arrives at church not for the wedding she has dreamed of, but for the funeral of her soldier, who is not coming home. “..They handed her a folded-up flag / And she held on to all she had left of him.” She is left wishing that this nightmare were only a dream.
The song “Travelin’ Soldier”, by the Dixie Chicks, tells a story of young love, forever unfulfilled. A lonely young man on his way to Vietnam asks a waitress if he can write to her, because he has no one else. And when he falls, she alone is left to mourn his loss: “And one name read, but nobody really cared / But a pretty little girl with a bow in her hair.”
Finally, in “Silver Wings & Sweet Memories”, performed by the Statler Brothers, a woman raises a child alone, remembering throughout her life the young solider who died in battle. “To this day on her top shelf / There’s a flag folded three-cornered layin’ all by itself.” For her, as for all the families of fallen heroes, the war will never end.
We salute all the soldiers who will not come home from war, and the families who mourn them.
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