Uncle Charlie's Friend
I was barely ten years old
When I heard the news
Couldn’t quite comprehend
Why Marshall wasn’t coming home
People said he was the best of them
My Uncle Charlie’s friend
I can remember my Ma and Pop
All their friends crying out loud
The whole town coming out
For a man everybody loved
Sent off to a foreign land
Never coming home again
When Uncle Charlie came home
Used to sit on the porch
He and his drums playing a song
Damning the Viet Cong in Marshall’s name
Used to look at him through the smoke
Watch him shake, the blunt of people’s jokes
Seemed to have an unquenchable thirst
Twenty-two going past a hundred
What it was I never understood
Turned him into a piece of wood
Thirty years gone by
Seem to have a different view
As I look back on things I never knew
I see my Uncle Charlie’s friend in a different light
No longer just a name
As I’ve watched some of my friends go
It’s dawned on me why the whole town turned out
For Uncle Charlie’s friend
The smoke has cleared, the thirst is gone
Only the echos of drums remain
On the porch of a house no longer there
My memory knows him as Marshall
What’s left of the town
Speaks of him as the best of them
Though they haven’t thought of him in years
The way and why he died, they haven’t forgotten
It’s only now I comprehend, the pain and grief
My Pa’s brother and the whole town felt
For my Uncle Charlie’s, my Uncle Charlie’s friend.
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