I think we are on the same plane. In the past century, wars were frequent, and successive generations of men went off to fight war and died. In the song, he mentions that years and tears went by as I collected dust. To me, that implies that his father never returned... he must have died. Death is permanent and mothers and their sons must listen and recognize that someday never comes: war never ceases, and young men will always go off to the battlefield and die. The song made me think of relatives that went off to foreign lands at an early age never to return. What a tragic end to life. We take life for granted these days.