The World War One Scot soldier poet Charles Hamilton Sorley
As of Sunday 11 February 2007, the War in Iraq had killed 3123 U.S. military women and men, and 23,417 U.S. military women and men have been wounded.
Meanwhile, Fox News Channel is pumping up the volume, frothing with righteous American bloodlust, and beating the drums for a new war, with Iran.
They're just our neighbors' children, we can push them into combat and we can sustain their return home in flag-draped coffins. They're all volunteers now; they knew what they were getting into when they signed up.
The Iranian military is weak and will fold right away when we invade, and the Iranian people have begged to be liberated from strict and oppressive religious rule. Iranians will be happy to see American tanks roll into Tehran, and pretty Iranian girls will run into the street to kiss the American soldiers and Marines.
How, exactly, does one say this politely and respectfully? The president and his war-happy cabal have lost their fucking minds. Bush is a lame duck with no political support from Congress and the American people. But he is Commander-in-Chief, and the only move left in his doomed chess game is to start another war, to divert the American people from his catastrophe in Iraq, and rally a new round of support for a new American war. And then he can leave the soldiers and Iraq and Iran to the next president to deal with.
If you have a little time, this might be the last couple of weeks when it might be possible to send e-mails to your Senators and your Representative in Congress and say:
I do not want the United States to start a war against Iran.
Send a copy to U.S. Secretary of State Dr. Condoleezza Rice, and to U.S. Secretary of Defence Dr. Robert M. Gates. They pretend to be sane on television. Maybe they can effectively resist Bush's psychotic intention to start another war in the final months of his disastrous presidency.
If enough people write enough very clear and angry letters, this might be an American war that never begins. And you will have signed your name to the War That Didn't Begin. The War That Has No Memorial to Its Dead in Washington DC, because it has no War Dead.
Without doubt, Bush will go down in history as the worst president since Warren G. Harding; his legacy of catastrophic failure and footshooting harm to the United States was carved into stone several years ago. In my lifetime, he makes Richard Nixon look good.
The color and the flavor of what's happening to American soldiers and Marines in the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars haven't included much good poetry, but there once was a war in the English-speaking world that, for some mysterious reason, left behind deeply moving and brilliant poetry written by its soldier victims. The world is generous: Some of them survived the ghastly war.
Vleeptron first ran this poem on 08 August 2005.
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Charles Hamilton Sorley, a Scot from Aberdeen, was shot through the head and died instantly at age 20, at the Battle of Loos, on Wednesday 13 October 1915. His body was lost, but his kit bag was found and sent home to his family. They found this poem inside it.
When You See Millions
of the Mouthless Dead
Charles Hamilton Sorley (1895-1915)
When you see millions of the mouthless dead
Across your dreams in pale battalions go,
Say not soft things as other men have said,
That you'll remember. For you need not so.
Give them not praise. For, deaf, how should they know
It is not curses heaped on each gashed head?
Nor tears. Their blind eyes see not your tears flow.
Nor honour. It is easy to be dead.
Say only this, "They are dead." Then add thereto,
"Yet many a better one has died before."
Then, scanning all the o'ercrowded mass, should you
Perceive one face that you loved heretofore,
It is a spook. None wears the face you knew.
Great death has made all his for evermore.
Original text: Charles Hamilton Sorley. Marlborough and other Poems. 4th edition. Cambridge: University Press, 1919: 78 (no. XXXIV). First publication date: 1916. Composition date: 1915. Form: sonnet. Rhyme: ababbabacdcdcd
3 comments:
wow, it is scary to think there are poeple out there like you who have no idea what we are fighting for. Unfortunately there are so many of you, who just don't get it, who can't see past their stubborn, selfish, frightened minds. Shortly you WILL find out just what we WERE fighting for because soon enough, due to those who see things the way you do, there won't be a war in Iraq and you will see how that war once protected your safety, protected humanity and integrity... and so much more.
Yo Anonymous Driveby Complainer:
Let's start primitive and ugly. Did you ever serve the USA in uniform? Check one:
[ ] Yes I did
[ ] No, all my notions about war are based on a lifetime as a civilian, and on the crap I watch on Fox News and CNN.
I served. Army. Honorably, with a couple of medals, during the Vietnam War.
An equally senseless, useless liars' and scoundrels' war. That dragged on and on and only ended when Americans took to the streets and raised holy hell in the democratic political process.
Ever seen that movie "Red Dawn"? An enemy army invades our Rocky Mountain region, and ordinary Americans risk their lives to drive the enemy out of their homeland. It was a huge hit with American audiences, it really touched something about our love for freedom, and what we'd risk to drive a foreign invader from our home.
What do you think is going on in Iraq? Why are so many Iraqis and Muslims in the region risking their lives to make us go away? Why didn't their pretty girls run out in the streets to hug and kiss our soldiers who liberated them from Sadaam Hussein?
Listen, Anonymous dude, I just woke up and haven't had my coffee yet. I can't even find my damn password.
You've come in late on this movie. Check out the numerical update as of yesterday, and fasten your seatbelts for a few weeks from now when we hit the 4000 mark:
http://vleeptronz.blogspot.com/2008/03/coming-up-on-4000-us-military-deaths-in.html
And click on the link:
What we have done
... and see what we have done to our neighbors' children. And what McCain says we'll still be doing a century from now.
Oh, and I'm happy you find me scary. If you REALLY want to be scared -- this is how most Americans on active duty in uniform feel about these loopy wars. Every once in a while, somebody does an independent opinion survey of soldiers, marines, sailors, Air Force people. Most of them think we should get out of Iraq yesterday.
I guess there were guys in my barracks during Vietnam who liked the Vietnam War. I just never met any of them. Well, there was this one loopy illiterate moron who they made a cook. He wanted to be an infantryman and go to Vietnam and kill Communists.
Yawn. and Boo!
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