I'm kinda a clueless and I missed the military angle completely. Now I get it and it makes a lot more sense.

Obviously, everyone else is a bit more clued in than me, or more in tune with this kind of theme.

Not sure if this will help and I'm saying you need to make changes, but the lines that put me off track (doesn't take much) are these:

Next to unopened bills - I thought there was some kind of financial difficulty


See he never was with her, And now he’s just gone - I started thinking about some deadbeat husband leaving her in the lurch.

She asked him to quit - here where I started thinking it was a drug problem or maybe gambling.

She always knew the battle would take his soul - I thought it was a battle with drugs or gambling.

I guess "take his soul" really threw me off. I can see how the battle would take his life, but "take his soul" implies to me a loss of his moral compass or something. So I thought that he lost the "battle" with the thing he asked her to quit, but a real battle.

The song was much better for me on the second listen after getting a clue.

-ant

My albums "Rhythms of Life" and "Out On The Road" are on Bandcamp, Spotify and Apple Music.