INFANTRYMAN

On this day of remembrance I thought I would share a song. It's not a new song. I wrote it some years ago. I was in a hotel in Ottawa about to leave when I saw a photo of a soldier returning home to his family.  The photograph is titled Burst of Joy. The look on the soldier's daughter, the way her fingers are outstretched as she runs to her father on the tarmac says it all - she can't wait to hold him.

I started looking for other photos of soldiers returning home to their families.  There are no shortage of them on the net. Most of the ones I looked at were archival photos from World War II. That iconic photo of the sailor dipping and kissing his wife or girlfriend in what might be Times Square was prominent on many websites but there were other photos just as moving.

I began writing a song, a jubilant song about soldiers coming home.  I imagined flags waving, the streets lined with family members, soldiers being hoisted up onto the shoulders of friends and family. Then I saw these photo below and the line, "draped in the maple leaf" entered my head.  That's when I knew the song was not going to be around a jubilant homecoming but a tragic one.  And I've had that happen many times.  Sometimes the song I end up with is not the song that I began writing. I began to change my focus with the song based on the image of the flag covered casket.

Right around the same time I was begining to dig into this song, and in a very unfortunate and sad coincidence, a nephew of a family friend died in Afghanistan.  His name was Corporal Nathan Hornburg. He was killed by a mortar while trying to help a disabled tank. I was asked to sing at his funeral and this was the impetus to finish the song Infantryman.

Here is the song.

As I write this blog entry and a bit of an epilogue, I see that there is now a memorial bridge named after Nathan Hornburg in Calgary.  Watch the story below.