The Unknown Soldier

Song Name: The Unknown Soldier

Year of Release: 1968

Written By: Jim Morrison, Ray Manzarek, Robby Krieger, John Densmore

Performed By: The Doors

Key Lyrics: "Breakfast where the news is read/ Television children fed/ Unborn living, living dead/Bullet strikes the helmet's head."

"And it's all over/For the unknown soldier."

Description: The lead singer of The Doors, Jim Morrison, was inspired to write the song when he visited the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery on the same day that the band performed in the area. Matthew Greenwald of AllMusic summed up the song’s structure in this quote: “It opens with an eerie organ intro before moving into a jazzy first verse ... A brilliant and dramatic middle section is actually a studio-recreated firing squad, complete with shots. The second verse is a slightly harder-rocking version of the first. The song then erupts into a climactic, extended coda, which is the audio re-creation of the celebration of either victory or the END of war.” The song features a gunshot sound as well as tolling bells and crowds at the end, the latter of which is designed to celebrate the end of a war. 

Why It Was Important: The song became a way of conveying how the war was portrayed in the eyes of normal people on TV. Lyrics such as "Breakfast where the news is read/ Television children fed/ Unborn living, living dead,” showed how ordinary families were oblivious to the true human cost of war. During live performances of the song, Morrison would often have guitarist Robby Krieger pretend to shoot him, complementing the death of the soldier in the lyrics. The song talks about the death of the unknown soldier, before talking about how the war was over, and includes ironic enthusiasm in the outro to demonstrate its point. The song was intended to demonstrate that an unknown soldier was killed in battle and forgotten as people celebrated the end of the war. The song was very controversial at the time, and many stations banned it due to its anti-war subject matter

Recordings

The Doors - The Unknown Soldier (studio version)

The Doors - The Unknown Soldier (Live At The Bowl '68) (live performance)