| The Lumineers – Charlie Boy Lyrics | 12 years ago |
| The song is about my older brother, Charles Joseph Schultz, 2Lt. in the Marine Corps who volunteered to join the Corps despite having been accepted to graduate school at the U. of Michigan School of Natural Resources, after he had graduated from Muhlenburg College in Allentown, Pa. Charlie was in Nam for 30 days when he was killed in an ambush in Quang Tri province in a night firefight when he was walking "point." Charlie was a devotee of John F. Kennedy and thought it was his duty to go to war as his "country needed him." Lillian was our mother, Charlie her first born in '44, and Upland Ave. is where we lived in Metuchen, N.J. Wes is Charlie's nephew by my brother, Mike, who was a psychologist until his death from cancer in 2007. I can see Mike in Wes' face and hear him in his songs. Charlie did not have to go to Nam or even into the service as he would have been deferred for grad school had he chosen to do that. To this day, I wish he had. But he did what he thought was right and gave his all, that "last full measure of devotion," Lincoln spoke of at Gettysburg. Would that it had been in a cause as worthwhile as that war. But Charlie was and is a hero as are all those men who served their country, right or wrong, in Vietnam. Not many days go by when I don't think of him and miss him. | |
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