Under a Blue Colorado Sky

This is a song that woke me from sleep the other day at 4:00 AM. It was written and given life by 9:00, recorded from the desk in my living room by 9:00 the next morning and then uploaded to www.acidplanet.com. You can hear it by searching for my name under "artists." It's a song based on some e-mail conversations with a friend from my Camp David days (he's the one on the right). He went into law enforcement, I went into an office. He's been attacked by knife-wielding assailants, run through forest fires, and stared down the barrels of hostile guns. Sure, I've had my share of staple puncture wounds and paper cuts, especially the ones on my tongue from licking envelopes, but...

they don't write songs about bureaucrats.


Under a Blue Colorado Sky

Youthful dreams of a place in the sun, we all had them, and the dreams took us places
We could never imagine the things we would see or the fun and the smiling faces
We donned green uniforms in the last of our teens and we trained hard for country and Corps
Then most of us climbed down The Hill where it seemed that our lives couldn't wait any
more...

I put down the green and I picked up the blue
Colorado prepared me for peace
But I found that the peace of the Rockies was hard
It's an undeclared war at the least

I've had to run through the flames of man's fire
Nearly 200 feet they just couldn't get higher
And it nearly came right down to the wire
Under a blue Colorado sky

I'll never forget that terrible day
When I heard the voice on my radio say
That the Columbine kids were being killed as they prayed
Under a blue Colorado sky

I can't put into words that you might understand
There's no way to convey what I see
So I'll look to the heavens, I'll look to the birds
And let the silence of the winds speak for me

A chopper crash once took some men
Among the dead was a special friend
He went down in the trees then he rose again
Under a blue Colorado sky

And my good friend died of a gunshot heart
His wife raises six kids alone
A bullet's bite from some fool's jealous spite
Left him cold as the Columbine stone

I've seen men suffer and I've seen them die
Babies too while their momma's cry
But the saddest thing is to say good-bye
Under a blue Colorado sky

Now I don't ask questions, I don't ask why
I just trust that when God says it's my turn to die
That he'll grant me the grace to say good-bye
Under a blue Colorado sky
Under a blue Colorado sky

The Patriot Bowl

I can't get it out of my head. I wish I could, but I can't. It's been three weeks since America the Beautiful, the National Anthem, the military color guard, the Navy Blue Angels fly-by and of course, the Super Bowl. And yes, it was an outstanding contest. Let's forget that I had to leave the game with five minutes left and that it was by all accounts the best five minutes of football all year. Whatever, I'm over it. No, what I can't seem to shake off is, of all things, the coin toss.I thought it to be the most portentous coin toss I've ever seen.

Did you notice it?

General Petraus flipped it from the fifty yard line. He looked so small standing there in his best green smile and his dress green uniform, all jangly and medally, next to the gathered gridiron heroes on either side. Who knows, if Pat Tillman hadn't joined the Army maybe he would've been there in Cardinal red next to the smiling little general. But he wasn't there. He was just dead, accidentally shot by his own men, as it turns out, after the media finally water-boarded the Army into confessing. The coin looked oversized and heavy, perched on the 4-star thumb, and it launched with greater effort than usual, I thought. Heads. Tails. Some live, some die. The coin flopped lazily through the stadium air like a fat girl being thrown from a horse, and plopped onto the turf with the same dull thud that my daughter's hamster makes when he drops off the top bars of his cage. Or the same sound a gut-shot soldier makes when he flops onto the dirt.

But it's getting better, isn't it?

Isn't that why the general was smiling at the big game?

I met a sergeant the other day just back from Iraq. He was an EOD guy, a bomb defuser, and he was jumpy as a cat, worse than me. I mean, I flinched the other night while opening a package of flour tortillas. A soft package, it was, not crinkly and hard like you get with cheese doodles, and I don't even have a reason to BE that way. But trust me, this sergeant would have jumped at tortillas dropping onto a bed of cotton balls. So I asked him: How's it going over there? He shook his head and grimaced as he made that universal symbol of uncertainty, mensa-mensa, with his hand, the one that looks like you're flipping fresh tortillas from off a sun-beaten rock in Iraq. Where grimacing generals belong...