Songs, poems speak of fresh ordeals Protests: Redgum's John Schumann. The soldier is forever returning, be it in song, or poem, or book, or film. Whether you turn to the classics - Homer's Odyssey, Shakespeare - to Hollywood or to Hemingway, you will find protagonists confronting variations on the theme of homecoming from war. In Australia, too, this has proved fertile ground, and the public has shown a willingness to embrace complicated and confronting depictions of war and its aftermath. Over the past four decades, three songs have earned iconic stature, each dealing with the postwar experience with unsparing frankness. Cold Chisel's Don Walker. Cold Chisel's Khe Sanh, written by Don Walker, was a pub anthem that became an unofficial national anthem for some, telling the tale of a struggling Vietnam veteran's return to civilian life. Delivered with ferocious energy by Jimmy Barnes, the song is raw but doesn't give you time to stop and cry, unlike Redgum's 1983 hit I Was Only 19, which is unfailingly heartwrenching. John Schumann, who wrote the song as a reaction to the damage he saw had been done as men returned from Vietnam, says it has moved Australian audiences profoundly from the first time he sang it. "The front six rows started to cry," Schumann recalls. Eric Bogle has seen similar reactions over the 40 years he has been performing And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda, an unflinching portrayal of the physical and mental devastation the Gallipoli campaign, and other wars since, inflicted. "It doesn't matter what war you're writing about, the end result is exactly the same - dead wee boys," says Bogle, a Scot who had been in Australia only a couple of years when he wrote the song. I was surprised then and I still am surprised by its longevity. In the last couple of years it's got more of a response because our boys were dying again. It's actually disappointing from a human point of view. Poet Bruce Dawe, author of the acclaimed Vietnam-era poem Homecoming, says he was struck at the time by images of war's vicious cycle - young men going in, body bags coming out. "The Americans were right to deal with that in various Vietnam films - The Deer Hunter and so on - where the homecoming is almost as bad for those who come back and can't leave the war behind as for those who come back damaged in some other way or those who'd died," he says.