We begin with Steppenwolf’s “None Of Your Doing.” John Kay described it as the story of a Vietnam soldier coming home and nobody understanding what he went through. He can’t deal with what happened to him, and there’s no connection between home and what he’s now having to deal with.

That’s the centre of the whole episode: the broken connection. War creates one reality. Home expects another. And the returning soldier is left standing between the two. Not quite there. Not quite back. And totally misunderstood.

This is Steppenwolf and “None Of Your Doing”.

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Steppenwolf gives us the returning soldier as a person out of place. He comes home, but nobody understands what he’s been through. The word “home” is still there, but the meaning has changed.

Black Sabbath’s “Hand Of Doom” takes us into the damage before it’s even fully reached home.

On an episode of Classic Albums, Geezer Butler described visiting an American army base in England that was used by soldiers who’d finished their tour of duty in Vietnam. Instead of going straight back to America, they were in a kind of halfway house. The band talked to these soldiers, and Butler says they were in a terrible state. A lot of them were using heroin. Nothing about it was on the news, he says, but many American troops were using drugs to get through that horrible war, and it, naturally, stuck in his mind.

That’s a crucial next step. In “None Of Your Doing,” the soldier is already home and can’t connect.

In “Hand Of Doom,” we see why the connection may have been broken before he ever got there.

The halfway house becomes a powerful image: not the war zone, not home, but a suspended place between the two. A place for people who are technically finished with war, but not free of it. The drugs are not presented as glamour or rebellion. They are survival, numbness, damage — the body and mind trying to escape what they’ve been put through.

And that’s one of the darkest truths in this thread. Society may think the war ends when the tour ends. The songs keep telling us it doesn’t. Even to the point, as the lyric says, “You need someone to help you stick the needle in”.

With one of the strongest bass lines ever created, this is Black Sabbath and “Hand of Doom”.

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Black Sabbath show us soldiers caught in the in-between: no longer on the battlefield, not yet safely returned, carrying damage that ordinary life is not ready to see.

Elton John’s “Daniel” brings that story into the family.

In Music Connection, Bernie Taupin explained that, “the original lyric of ‘Daniel’ had another verse, which basically explained what the song was about. But because it was too long, we left it out and, of course, to this day people are still wondering what that song is about. It’s basically about a young boy whose older brother is a Vietnam vet who comes home to the farm, and he can’t find any peace, so he flies off to Spain where he can hopefully find some. It’s written from the boy’s point of view as he watches him fly away.”

That perspective matters. We’re not inside the veteran’s head. We are standing beside someone who loves him and doesn’t fully understand him. The younger brother sees Daniel as distant, damaged, almost mythic. He knows Daniel has returned, but he also knows Daniel isn’t really back in the way everyone might have hoped.

This is a gentler song than “Hand Of Doom,” but in some ways it’s just as sad. Because the rejection here isn’t necessarily cruel. It’s not people spitting or shouting. It’s the softer failure of home not being enough. The farm can’t restore him. Family love can’t translate what happened. So Daniel leaves again.

That gives us a different kind of post-war exile. He “survived” the war, then he got home, but peace is somewhere else — or at least he hopes it is.

Sometimes the return is only another departure.

Here’s a song that needs no introduction.

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“Daniel” is a family’s view of the returning veteran: someone loved, but unreachable; someone home, but still searching for peace.

Bruce Springsteen’s “Born In The USA” turns that private absence into a public argument.

Springsteen told Charlie Rose on PBS that it was one of his first songs about Vietnam. In his book “Born to Run”, he called it “my soldier’s story” — a protest song, a GI blues. He describes the verses as an accounting, and the chorus as a declaration of the one sure thing that cannot be denied: birthplace. Having paid body and soul, he says, you’ve earned many times over the right to claim and shape your piece of home ground.

That explanation is essential, because it pushes against the way the song is often misunderstood. This is not simple flag-waving. It’s a song about the bitter gap between what a country says about itself and what it does to the people it sends to fight.

The soldier’s birthplace is the one thing that can’t be taken from him. But everything else seems up for grabs: dignity, opportunity, recognition, care, belonging. The phrase “Born in the USA” becomes less a celebration than a claim. I was born here. I was sent from here. I paid here, body and soul. So what am I owed when I return?

That’s the sharp turn from “Daniel.” Daniel leaves because home can’t give him peace. Springsteen’s soldier demands that home recognise him. Not as a symbol. Not as a slogan. But as a person who’s earned the right to stand on his own ground.

And the tragedy is that he has to demand it at all.

This is Bruce Springsteen and “Born In The USA”.

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Springsteen gives the returning soldier a claim: birthplace, home ground, the right to belong after paying body and soul.

Tom Petty’s “The Criminal Kind” shows what happens when that claim is denied so completely that the returned veteran is seen not as someone owed care, but as danger.

Petty told Melody Maker in 1981 that the song came from watching the news and being disturbed by violence — kids being shot, gangs, people killing each other. But then he gives the specific image that sparked the song: a Vietnam veteran who drove his jeep through the front door of a veterans hospital, saying he was dying from Agent Orange, that he was crazy, and that he was trying to tell them. Petty says they wouldn’t treat him, and the man killed himself.

That’s one of the most brutal meanings in this whole thread. Because it’s not only about war trauma. It’s about institutional refusal. A man is saying, in the most desperate way possible: I’m dying, I’m not well, I’m trying to tell you. And the system still doesn’t hear him.

Petty then connects that news story with another image from the road: a man in an old Ford, Petty looks at him and his first thought is that he’s a killer. Then he saw the Army dog tags hanging around the mirror like dice and decided to write this song.

That’s the collapse the song is circling. A society sends people to war, fails to treat the damage properly, and then reads the visible result as menace. The veteran becomes the criminal kind — not because that’s what he is, but because rejection, illness and neglect have narrowed how the world sees him.

So the story darkens again.

From Springsteen’s claim to home ground, we arrive at the veteran outside the hospital door, still trying to be recognised, and still being refused.

This is Tom Petty and The Criminal Kind.

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Tom Petty gives us the nightmare of post-war rejection: a veteran sick, desperate, and not treated; a person turned into a warning sign by the very society that failed him.

Joe Grushecky’s “Somewhere East of Eden” moves the story into a later war, but the pattern is painfully familiar.

Grushecky said the title came from two things arriving together. He’d found an old copy of Steinbeck’s East of Eden, one of his favourite books, and the next day he was reading about Iraq veterans returning home. Iraq, mythically and traditionally, is where the Garden of Eden was supposed to be, and the phrase struck him: these guys were returning to the United States from somewhere east of Eden.

Then he read about one particular soldier who’d pulled an Iraqi family from a burning wreck and was never able to recover from it. Grushecky describes him as “like a master of war,” but when he got home, he could barely find any work. That story spurred the song.

That’s an extraordinary contrast: someone capable of an act of courage in the middle of catastrophe, returning to a society that can’t find a place for him. The phrase “master of war” sounds powerful, but at home the mastery has no use. The skills, the trauma, the memory, the moral injury — none of it fits the job market or the everyday rhythm of civilian life.

And that’s the continuity from Vietnam to Iraq. The geography changes. The headlines change. The language of each war changes. But the return can still fail in the same way.

A person comes back from somewhere east of Eden — from the place where innocence has already been lost — and discovers that the country he returns to doesn’t know what to do with him.

Here’s Joe Grushecky and “Somewhere East of Eden”.

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“Somewhere East of Eden” gives us the modern veteran as someone caught between heroic action and civilian invisibility: a man who saves lives in war and can barely find work at home.

Jason Isbell’s “Tour Of Duty” brings the episode to a quieter but very important ending.

Isbell says the song isn’t a song about war itself. It’s about the effect war has on certain people when they’re coming home — and he says he knows a little about that. He talks about small towns, where a higher percentage of people fight overseas, and he’s careful not to reduce it to simple policy slogans. His focus is on individuals and their stories. Not having been to war himself, Isbell doesn’t write about being in war itself, only the effect war has on the home front and on individuals — something he says many people overlook.

That final phrase is the key to this whole episode: many people overlook it.

Because the returning soldier’s story is often inconvenient. It complicates the clean version of war. It asks what patriotism means after the parade, after the headline, after the uniform becomes ordinary clothes again. It asks who stays to listen when the person who returns is angry, addicted, grieving, unemployed, ill, unreachable, or simply not the same as before.

Isbell gives us a way to end without pretending to solve anything. He doesn’t claim to speak from the battlefield. He speaks from the place around it — the small town, the family, the home front, the people trying to live with the consequences.

And maybe that’s where the real listening has to happen. Not only at memorials, not only in slogans, not only in songs of protest, but in the ordinary places where people come back to and try to keep living.

A tour of duty ends.

The duty of care should not.

Here’s my favourite singer songwriter of modern times. This is Jason Isbell with “Tour of Duty”.

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