Johnny Comes Marching Home

We came back, with high hopes and horses.
“They’ll have to have a parade, at least twice a week.
We’ll be princes.
Kings, even!”
But disappointed doesn’t begin to cover it.
We didn’t even get the hatred we feared,
Gnawing at the back of our guilty minds.
We knew what we did, that it clearly pass the line of good morality.
But we were trained at keeping secrets from ourselves.
No, we were ignored.
Forgotten pieces of scenery.
We are just another group of faces in redneck fatigues.
We fought a war for you.
That’s our slogan, at least.
That was our justification.
Our driving force behind our atrocities, our Get-Out-Of-Jail free card.
We got to get on top.
Escaped the system.
We get our trip into the Darkness of Africa,
But this time its in the Western hemisphere of other people’s minds.
We raped, pillaged, burned and plundered.
But we saved you!
It was all for you.
This wouldn’t be possible without our courage to overstep the boundaries they set up,
To hide behind, to plot against us.
We saved you.
But we returned, by just turning around, to an empty town,
With no faces to smile or scowl.
No women to embrace or lose.
Nothing.
All because of us.
Because we saved you.
To slow to learn, we are, that we get no thanks from corpses.
Oh, how our delusions led us directly down a fated path.
We were our own end.
Doomed to fail from the start, it seems, because we insisted on standing alone, against each other.