WHAT WAR DID I FIGHT IN?

What war he asked did I fight in? Well, I didn’t really say
So, I stopped and thought for a little while, then I answered him this way
I was in the landing at Gallipoli fighting under Turkish skies
When my father, he was just a gleam inside my grand-dad’s eyes

And I lay there on a bed in France amid the dying and the dead
With my face turned in toward the wall to hide my hideous head
I never was no hero, I simply moved by instinct, when,
I grabbed a sandbag, dived on the bomb, and saved those other men

Both my hands were missing, I lay in bed a shattered wreck
When an angel stood beside me and she kissed me on the neck
A girl no more than seventeen, my heart danced and seemed to skip
As I turned my blind eyes to her and felt her warm and tender lips

She didn’t see my patchwork face she saw a hero young and brave
For her father was among those men my instinctive actions saved
And that was me there in New Guinea with bandaged eyes and looking frail
As that fuzzy wuzzy native led me down Kokoda trail

I was also in Korea and I died in Vietnam
And one day some Aussie soldier poet will take me to Afghanistan
In dream, I was in Babylon where I heard a young lad pray
A young soldier born in Queensland; now I long see the day

That he puts his thoughts in writing for my friends, these words you mark
Your Grand-kids of the future will fight with him, there in Iraq
In the ocean where man’s spirits merge, to where life’s rivers flow and end
Don’t just wallow in the shallows mate, but to the darkest depths descend

There you’ll merge with spirits of the past, you’ll live a thousand lives
You’ll share their joys and laughter, but then, a thousand deaths you’ll die
Torn and tortured on the barbed wire, the sun searing from the blue
My revolver lying by my side, I did what God refused to do.

What war, you ask did I fight in, what war do I recall
In every war throughout man’s history mate, I have fought and died in all.