We started this class reading a collection of poems from World War I, Brooke, Owen, Sassoon, and others. Throughout the semester, I’ve focused on the poetry of war and peace and have done quite a bit out outside reading as well. The best book I’ve read is American War Poetry, An Anthology edited by Lorrie Goldensohn (Columbia University Press, 2006 ) which begins with the colonial wars and ends with the current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.  The most outstanding source for poetry today is the world wide web and the diverse voices from present conflicts will both lighten the spirit and dishearten the soul of the reader.

What follows is a brief anthology of poems I’ve collected this semester. As we covered WWI poetry in class on previous blog entries, I’ve started with World War II.The only World War II poem that we as a class touched on was The Death Of The Ball Turret Gunner by Randall Jarrell, probably the foremost poet of the war but only one contributor of a whole body of work in which American war poetry came of age. All of the poems quoted here are readily available in full on the web, I’m just quoting my favorite lines.

Wallace Stevens, America’s businessmen poet wrote from an existential perspective that resonates with the heart after a few deep readings.

 From Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction Soldier, there is a war between the mindAnd sky, between thought and day and night. It isFor that the poet is always in the sun, Patches the moon together in his roomTo his Virgilian cadences, up down,Up down. It is a war that never ends. Yet it depends on yours. The two are one.They are a plural, a right and left, a pair,Two parallels that meet if only in The meeting of their shadows or that meetIn a book in a barrack, a letter from Malay.But your war ends. And after it you return With six meats and twelve wines or else withoutTo walk another room . . . Monsieur and comrade,The soldier is poor without the poet’s lines, His petty syllabi, the sounds that stick,Inevitably modulating, in the blood.And war for war, each has its gallant kind.          Another by very moving poem by Randall Jarrell is Protocols written about the extermination camp Birkenau, an extension of Auschwitz and the Ukrainian city Odessa on the Black Sea that had a large Jewish population before World War II: 

Protocols 

 (Birkenau, Odessa; the children speak alternately.) We went there on the train. They had big barges that they towed. We stood up, there were so many I was squashed.There was a smoke-stack, then they made me wash.It was a factory, I think. My mother held me upAnd I could see the ship that made the smoke. When I was tired my mother carried me.She said, “Don’t be afraid.” But I was only tired.Where we went there is no more .Odessa.They had water in a pipe–like rain, but hot;The water there is deeper than the world And I was tired and fell in in my sleepAnd the water drank me. That is what I think.And I said to my mother, “Now I’m washed and dried.”My mother hugged me and it smelled like hay

And that is how you die. And that is how you die.

  

 Richard Wilbur served in the US army in France and, as the allied forced crossed into Germany, spent the early months of 1945 in Alsace, the province on the French German border; the site of many battles over the ages including WWII.

 

First Snow in Alsace

The snow came down last night like moths

Burned on the moon; it fell till dawn,

Covered the town with simple cloths.

Absolute snow lies rumpled on

What shellbursts scattered and deranged,

Entangled railings, crevassed lawn.

As if it did not know they'd changed,

Snow smoothly clasps the roofs of homes

Fear-gutted, trustless and estranged.

The ration stacks are milky domes;

Across the ammunition pile

The snow has climbed in sparkling combs.

You think: beyond the town a mile

Or two, this snowfall fills the eyes

Of soldiers dead a little while.

Persons and persons in disguise,

Walking the new air white and fine,

Trade glances quick with shared surprise.

At children's windows, heaped, benign,

As always, winter shines the most,

And frost makes marvelous designs.

The night guard coming from his post,

Ten first-snows back in thought, walks slow

And warms him with a boyish boast:

He was the first to see the snow.

        The Holocaust was the purest expression of evil in mankind’s history; the survivors produced some remarkable poetry. What I’ve learned to love about poetry is the way in which the poet is forced to make every word count because he has so many less to work with than the prose writer. My poetry teacher likens it to a stew that is allowed to simmer; the full flavor comes only in the final, condensed version. Here, in Avrom Sutzkever’s Frozen Jews one can feel through the words the horrific brutality and inhumanity inflicted by one on another:

               Frozen Jews

  Have you seen, in fields of snow,
frozen Jews, row on row?Blue marble forms lying,
Not breathing, not dying.Somewhere a flicker of a frozen soul–
glint of fish in an icy swell.All brood. Speech and silence are one.
Night snow encases the sun.A smile glows immobile
from a rose lip’s chill.Baby and mother, side by side.
Odd that her nipple’s dried.Fist, fixed in ice, of a naked old man:
the power’s undone in his hand.

I’ve sampled death in all guises.

Nothing surprises.Yet a frost in July in this heat–
a crazy assault in the street.I and blue carrion, face to face.
Frozen Jews in a snowy space.Marble shrouds my skin.
Words ebb. Light grows thin.

I’m frozen, I’m rooted in place
like the naked old man enfeebled by ice

 The last WWII poem submitted here is by William Heyden. One of the most pervasive symbols of the holocaust are trains, specifically freight trains and box cars that hauled millions to their deaths. Just last week I visited the U.S. Holocaust memorial Museum in Washington D.C. One of the most striking exhibits is an actual freight car from the era, one that actually hauled its cargo of human misery.  Heyden’s remarkable poem looks at the return trip by those boxcars:

The Trains

Signed by Franz Paul Stangl, Commandant,
there is in Berlin a document,
an order of transmittal from Treblinka:

248 freight cars of clothing,
400,000 gold watches,
25 freight cars of women’s hair.

Some clothing was kept, some was pulped for paper.
The finest watches were never melted down.
All the women’s hair was used for mattresses, or dolls.

Would these words like to use some of that same paper?
One of those watches may pulse in your own wrist.
Does someone you know collect dolls, or sleep on human hair?

He is dead at last, Commandant Stangl of Treblinka,
but the camp’s three syllables still sound like freight cars
straining around a curve, Treblinka,

Treblinka. Clothing, time in gold watches,
women’s hair for mattresses and dolls’ heads.
Treblinka. The trains from Treblinka.

 

The Korean War was America’s forgotten war and it produced very little poetry over the decade that followed. It wasn’t until the era of the Vietnam War that the Korean War experience was reintroduced into the imagination as a complementary part of the experience in Vietnam. The poems that came out tended to be very lengthy so I’m not including them in this post. Let me suggest to the reader Thomas McGrath Ode for the American Dead in Asia and Reg Saner’s memorable prose poem, Flag Memoir and, foremost, Fragments of The Forgotten War by Suji Kwock Kim.

The Vietnam War was the war of my generation and divided out country like no time since the Civil War. There were no Rupert Brooks of the Vietnam era; the poetry that has emerged “developed a consensus of hearts and minds about stopping a war seen by nearly all those who chose to write poems as senseless and immoral.” (Goldensohn 286). The poetry that flourished was anti-war poetry, focused on the struggles and suffering of the individual squads rather than an inclusive or internationalist outlook. The poetry is mostly free verse, first person narrative; the carefully contrived iambic pentameters and rhyme schemes of British World War I poets is completely absent.

A starting point for Vietnam War poetry is with Harvard poetry instructor Robert Lowell, already an ancient war dissenter by the  1960’s, having refused serice in WWII.

His best know poems titled The March 1 and The March 2 refers to the 1967 march on the Pentagon, an historic antiwar demonstration. These poem were extensively written on by Norman Mailer, another well know anti war voice.

            The March 1

Under the too white marmoreal Lincoln Memorial
The too tall marmoreal Washington Obelisk,
Grazing into the too long reflecting pool,
The reddish trees, the withering autumn sky,
The remorseless, amplified harangues for peace––
Lovely to lock arms, to march absurdly locked
(unlocking to keep my wet glasses from slipping)
to see the cigarette match quaking in my fingers,
then to step off like green Union Army recruits
for the first Bull Run, sped by photographers,
the notables, the girls…fear, glory, chaos, rout…
our green army staggered out on the miles-long green fields,
met by the other army, the martian, the ape, the hero,
his new-fangled rifle, his green new steel helmet

             Another poem of protest was by Denise Levertov. She was an academic who posed the question: Do you leave your office when the bombs start falling? She did, protested, got tear gassed, and was proud of it.

                        At the Justice Department                        November 15, 1969

                                Brown gas-fog, white

beneath the street lamps.

Cut off on three sides, all space filled

with our bodies.

                        Bodies that stumble

in brown airlessness, whitened

in light, a mildew glare

                        that stumble

hand in hand, blinded, retching.

Wanting it, wanting

to be here, the body believing it’s

dying in the nausea, my head

clear in its despair, a kind of joy,

knowing this is by no means death,

is trivial, an incident, a fragile instant.

  

Allen Ginsberg was one of the best known antiwar figures. His longish poem From Iron Horse opens with the lines:

 

            Who’s the enemy, year after year?

                        War after war, who’s the enemy?

            What’s the weapon, battle after battle?

            What’s the news, defeat after defeat?

What’s the picture, decade after decade?

 

            David Huddle, currently teaching poetry at the University of Vermont,  served in Vietnam and wrote careful poetry that captured the perplexity of American boys trying to understand the dynamics of a completely foreign culture.

                         Work 

                        I am a white, Episcopal-raised, almost

college-educated, North American male.

Sergeant Tri, my interpreter, is engrossed

cin questioning our detainee, a small

bad-smelling man in rags who claims to be

a farmer. I am writing down what Sargeant Tri

tells me. This is dull. Suddenly Tri yanks

 

our detainee to his feet, slaps him twice

across the bridge of is nose. The farmer

whimpers. Tri says the farmer has lied and waits

for orders. Where I grew up, my father

waits at the door while my mother finishes

packing his lunch. I must tell Tri what to do next.

 

           

            Horace Coleman is a Vietnam veteran “class of ‘67″–0-1/0-2, MOS 1741 (weapons director/interceptor controller–air traffic controller.) He is the author of IN THE GRASS published by Vietnam Generation, Inc. & Burning Cities Press.

 OK CORRAL EASTBrothers in The Nam
Sgt Christopher and I are in Khanh Hoi,
down by the docks in the blues Bar.
The women are brown and there is no “Saigon Tea.”
We’re making our nightly HIT (’Hore Inspection Tour),
watching the black inside and out, digging night sights,
soul sounds and getting tight.The grunts in the corner raise undisturbed hell
as the timid MP’s freckles pale.
He walks past the dude high in the doorway,
in his lavender jump suit, to ask the mamma-san,
quietly, about curfew.He chokes on the weed smoke as
he sees nothing his color here and
he fingers his army rosary–his .45.But this is not Cleveland or Chicago;
he makes no one here cringe and
our gazes, like punji stakes, impale him.We have all killed something recently,
know who owns the night,
and carry darkness with us.   

Bruce Weigl volunteered for service and served in Nam tow 1967 and 1968, during the wars peak including the Tet Offensive. His poems show the aimlessness and hopeless felt by the soldiers serving, the total disillusionment met also is some of our reading this semester.

             The last LieSome guy in the miserable convoy
raised up in the back of our open truck
and threw a can of C rations at a child
who called into the rumble for food.
He didn’t toss the can, he wound up and hung it
on the child’s forehead and she was stunned
backwards into the dust of our trucks. Across the sudden angle of the road’s curving
I could still see her when she rose,
waving one hand across her swollen, bleeding head,
wildly swinging her other hand
at the children who mobbed her,
who tried to take her food.

I grit my teeth myself to remember that girl
smiling as she fought off her brothers and sisters.
She laughed
as if she thought it were a joke
and the guy with me laughed
and fingered the edge of another can
like it was the seam of a baseball
until his rage ripped
again into the faces of children
who called to us for food.

  

            The current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are producing huge amounts of poetry, much of it published informally on the web in various blogs. The first is by Jimmi Li, still currently serving and writing from the perspective of a Christian:

A Seabee’s Death

Ceasefire declared, “Its over!”
If it’s over why I look over my shoulder,
Still hearing deaths of Marines and soldier.
Why they radio to me then
Of casualties from an explosion,
The dead body of a Navy Seabee,
Less than a feet away from me,
In a sleeping bag leaking blood,
Caked with guts rather than mud?
Another face among the dead,
Cut in half, middle shredded,
Friends of his walking in shock,
Injured from an explosion not block.
That night I sat thinking,
Many things I was contemplating,
The world, life, God and me,
How life could end so shortly.

http://www.teamtruth.com/poetry/po_iraq.htm#SEABEESDEATH

  

Poem #2

Richard M. McGintry

   

WOUNDS THAT NEVER HEAL

In the blood red sunset I hear the sound.
It resounds, resounds, resounds
with the lonely bugle call that brings
each soul from the hell that was there,
together again as comrades in despair.
In the darkness that follows the sun
a new day is born, begun
with pearl pink streaks of light
that cannot be seen at sunset or night.
I touch my wife, my sleeping grandchild,
and think awhile.
Perhaps these wasted dead are heros
that have made
God smile.
 
(War in Iraq)

http://www.angelfire.com/wa/warpoetry/Woundsheal.html Poem #3  Two Brothers

http://www.angelfire.com/wa/warpoetry/Twobrothers.html

  Poem #3 Eulogy

Morning Edition, January 6, 2006 · Brian Turner is a soldier-poet who served for seven years in the U.S. Army. Beginning in November 2003, he was an infantry team leader in Iraq with the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division.

His book, Here, Bullet, reflects his war-time experiences in graceful and unflinching poetry. Turner tells Steve Inskeep about the military tradition in his family and why he joined the Army when he was almost 30. He reads selected poems from his collection and reflects on what inspired them. One poem, Eulogy, was written to memorialize a soldier in his platoon who took his own life.

 EulogyIt happens on a Monday, at 11:20 A.M.,
as tower guards eat sandwiches
and seagulls drift by on the Tigris River.
Prisoners tilt their heads to the west
though burlap sacks and duct tape blind them.
The sound reverberates down concertina coils
the way piano wire thrums when given slack.
And it happens like this, on a blue day of sun,
when Private Miller pulls the trigger
to take brass and fire into his mouth:
the sound lifts the birds up off the water,
a mongoose pauses under the orange trees,
and nothing can stop it now, no matter what
blur of motion surrounds him, no matter what voices
crackle over the radio in static confusion,
because if only for this moment the earth is stilled,
and Private Miller has found what low hush there is
down in the eucalyptus shade, there by the river.
   
                                                                                    PFC B. Miller
                                                              (1980-March 22, 2004)http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5126583

         In our readings for English 384 we have recently read two remarkable Vietnam War books, The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brian and Fallen Angels by Walter Dean Meyers.  Throughout the course of the class, I’ve been doing some relevant outside reading as well; for this section I’ve read the Vietnam section of the anthology collected by Lorrie Goldensohn American War Poetry and a personal war history by Randy Zahn, Snake Pilot.           

          Given their age, for my fellow classmates, the Vietnam War is largely a historical event, perhaps the war of their fathers or uncles. For me, although I did not serve, Vietnam was the war of my generation and my memories of the events of the 1960’s and early 1970’s are vivid.  I was in Washington DC last week and visited, for the seventh time now, the Vietnam Memorial Wall (I went for its dedications also). On that wall are the names of almost 59,000 guys that I grew up, played with, went to school with, and became a generation with. Those guys died young though, Meyer’s “Fallen Angels,” and never had the joy of seeing their kids grow up, last weeks sunset at Pere Marquette beach, or any of the bountiful joys and blessings we experience in our lives.         

            Between the recent readings and my recollections of conversations with Vets after the war, I felt inspired to write a poem, posted here. I chose to write a prose or narrative poem, a form e.e. cummings and Dan Gerber often used, based on a vivid recollection of the times. For those of you unfamiliar with the prose form of poetry, its intended to look like a normal paragraph, but read and sound like a poem. I don’t claim to be very good at it: 

My Brother’s Necklace            

      My brother Will (he’s really a step brother), an ex-Green Beret has a necklace he brought home from Vietnam. At first glance, its not much, about fourteen curled up brown wrinkles on a leather bootlace, each about the size of a half dollar, light as air, and looking for all the world like the chocolate rice cakes my wife munches on after the holidays. The thing is, though, its a necklace of human ears. Gook ears.              

       He explained that he didn’t really steal them because they belonged to the dead who didn’t need them anymore. He explained that he wanted a souvenir, something to connect him with the blood lust of the fight, something that showed the triumph over the men he killed. He explained that in our Father’s war, there were helmets, Lugers, flags, and metals to take home as souvenirs but in Vietnam the enemy wore only black pajamas and had only ears to offer. He explained that you had to have been there to understand it, that all of the “greenies” did it, that he was lucky to have got anything. After he got home, he kept it on the mantelpiece for a while, quite defensive about it, although soon he came to explain that it was really not a trophy. After a couple of years, he put the necklace away in a drawer. He explained that the dust collected on it.               

          Now he has it down in the basement in a box. He explains that the central heating makes it dry up all the more, that it will turn to dust. He will show you, though, anytime you ask.  He explains that the he’s no longer vindictive, that nobodies perfect. He explains that there were perfectly good reasons to fight that war, that the barbarity of the gooks to his brothers could not be allowed to pass. But he explains that during the white hot passion and terror of war, we could not really do anything to stop it while the war was going on, that we had to win the war first. He explained that we couldn’t always do what we would have liked to do. He explains the the gooks killed his brothers, cut off their testicles, and shoved them in their mouths. He explains how there weren’t any souvenirs of value, how it was always raining, how the terror corrupted the soul, how the mud smelled like ripe putrefaction of meaningless death. He explains that he really ought to keep it, that its his only connection to evil. A thing like that.                

       You really ought to go and see it. He’ll show it to you. All you have to do is ask. It’s not that its a very interesting necklace when you come right down to it, bunch of dried up rice cakes, but you learn a lot from his explanations.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           Bruce Bytwerk

I have a particular interest in poetry and as a part of this class have been reading quite a bit of war poetry. One of my favorite poets is William Butler Yeats and his poem “The Second Coming,” along with William Blake’s “The Tyger” are among poems that I’ve committed to memory. One of the joys of acquiring a memorized anthology of great poetry is to just be able to “while someone else is eating, opening a window, or just walking dully along “(W. H. Alden) pluck them out of your mind to contemplate the layers of meaning and interlocking complexities. There is no end of that in Yeats……Anyhow, imagine my surprise when my Goggle reader account turned up an article in the New York Times titled What W. B. Yeats’s ‘Second Coming’ Really Says About the Iraq War . According to the Times Editorial author Adam Cohen, “Yeats’s bleakly apocalyptic poem has long been irresistible to pundits. What historical era, after all, is not neatly summed up by his lament that “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity?” The poem concludes with terrifying visions of anarchy within a Middle Eastern backdrop over laden with heavy religious symbolism. Cohn claims that “The Second Coming” is fast becoming the official poem of the Iraq war.”

“Yeats wrote “The Second Coming” in 1919, an especially dismal moment in history. Europeans were shell-shocked from World War I, and deeply cynical. Yeats’s homeland, Ireland, was lurching toward civil war. The old order in Russia had just been toppled by a revolution that Yeats — who had a fondness for aristocracy — feared would spread across the continent and the globe.” The Poem reads as follows:

THE SECOND COMING

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

One of the aspects of literature we are always considering in our class is connections between authors and their concerns in eras different from our own . There are echoes all over the blogesphere of Yeat’s apocalyptical warnings and his concern with society spiraling out of control, the “Turning and turning in the widening gyre,” is fresh today in contemporary apprehensions about the Iraq war and its impact on our world as it was for Yeats in his. To view this article, please see:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/12/opinion/12mon4.html

            Its always been the letter most feared on the home front, the death notice. The Wall Street Journal recently ran an article titled The Last Letter Home.  When a soldier falls, commanders face a profound task; Accounting for a lost life to the family. The American military has a tradition going back to the Revolutionary War for commanders to write letters, still often by hand, to the families of the fallen soldier. Often these letters will give specific details of the soldier’s death as well as general comments about the quality of the person, his bravery, friendships, and the comradeship they enjoyed in the service of their country. The Journal article opens with the lines:

“How do you start a letter like this? How do you end it? On a raw November morning here, along the wild frontier bordering Pakistan, Lt. Col. Michael Fenzel spoke these words as he sat down to write to a father who would never see his son again.”

            When these letter became mandatory to write in 1948 there was a six paragraph guideline; today that’s grown to eight pages of “chillingly specific rules.” Fenzel anticipated the sad chore when he shipped out to Afghanistan and, so that he not have to use ordinary printer papers for such momentous correspondence,  brought with him some parchment stationery bearing the Airborne crest and seal. He wrote to the father of a deceased soldier, “Sir, we are very fortunate to have known and served with your son. We all know the irreparable loss you and your strong family have suffered, and we also know that there is very little any of us can say that will provide you any comfort.”   To read this article in full, see: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120588448903246933.html

The online WSJ article also contains some reader responses, one from a parent  of a young female soldier who died in Irag, who wrote:

 “I know that Lt. Col. Michael Fenzel and other commanding officers have a difficult time writing the “last letter home” However, as difficult as that task may be, it is immeasurably easier to write such a letter than to read it. As recipients of one such letter and many, many others written after our daughter Maj. Megan M. McClung was killed in Ar Ramadi on Dec. 6, 2006, we have come to know her through the eyes and hearts of her friends, fellow Marines, soldiers and those who only knew her from a distance but all of whom loved her. We now know her in a detail that is usually never afforded to the parents of grown children. Thank you for the article.  

And another:

“Nearly 60 years ago, I faced similar challenges as Lt. Col. Fenzel, and they were tough. The 382nd General Hospital received wounded soldiers from Korea’s battlefields. As the hospital registrar, I was also the commanding officer of all patients. A decorated sergeant was flown to our hospital with severe burns over most of his body. His prognosis was bad. A 14-year-old daughter was his nearest of kin and, according to him, his only relative. The hospital commander found me at my desk late one night with a pencil and blank pad trying to compose that Last Letter. He told me that there was a form I could use in the Army Regs. “Just have your clerk copy it and sign it,” he said. I couldn’t do that, and I finally drafted the very best message I could that a child might understand and perhaps treasure.”

            Iraq and Afghanistan in today’s war have now generated four thousand of these letters. During World War II, there were over 292,000 Americans in the military who lost their live in battle. First would come the official War Department Telegram, followed by a personal letter from a commanding officer. Sometimes grieving loved ones would also receive a carefully worded personal letter from a fellow serviceman, written from a foxhole, a crowed ship’s berth, or a flyer’s ready room during a lull in the action. Such was the cae for Mr. & Mrs. Claude M. Hilton who received the news that their only son, Private First Class John W. Hilton had been killed in action. The three letters reproduced here, which followed the initial telegram, are from Rod Cragg’s remarkable book, From Foxholes and Flight Decks, Letters home From World War II.  (becker &mayer!, Belview, Wash. 2002.) The first letters is from Hiltons commander, Captain James B. Vanderwater “The loss of your son…is felt by every member of this command….He was a splendid soldier. This he proved by his conduct on the filed of battle. The second letter, received a month later, is a deeply moving and intensely personal letter from a junior officer in their son’s infantry company, Second Lieutenant Ralph C. Clontz “My heart bleeds for you” he told the Hiltons, “and believe me when I tell you I was as crushed as you. [Your son] died in my arms …I personally could not have loved him more had he been my son or brother.” The third letter, received a year after the war ended carried such a tone of absolute finality reading “The War Department is most desirous that you be furnished information regarding the burial location of your son.”

             For more information on this remarkable book, please see: http://www.beckermayer.com/catalog.html             The class recently viewed the Oliver Stone’s 1989 movie Born On the Fourth of July starring Tom Cruise based on events of the Vietnam War. In one intensely moving scene, Cruise visited the family of a fallen soldier that he himself had killed in a “friendly fire” incident. The family had only received on the most generalized official information on the details of theirs son’s death and the film so vividly portrayed the varying reactions of family members to Cruise’s words. To see actual clips from this movie and read reviews, please see:http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/6747/Born-on-the-Fourth-of-July/overview 

 

            War produces all types of casualties, from horrific death on the battlefield to lingering injuries that degrade and impede life’s joys for a life time and may ultimately contribute to death years later. In reading Since You Went Away by Judy Barrett Litoff and David L Smith there were a number of letters written to injured combatants by their loved one back home. In one instance, the wounded man had extensive electroshock therapy for “shellshock” and continued, although married, employed and a father, to have monthly treatments for the rest of his life. There were several summaries of the correspondents lives after the war that mentioned the lifelong implications of physical and physiological injuries sustained in combat. Many of these soldiers were never given the full hero treatment just as today some wounded Middle East Veterans come home to an uncertain future and ambiguous status.

 

            A Muskegon Chronicle article from March 20, 2008 focus on a local man, Daniel Nichols, who became a victim of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) from his Iraq war experience. The article, titled The Invisible wounds of the Iraq War opens:

“As dawn broke over Baghdad…March 20, 2003, U. S. Army Pvt. Daniel Nichols…driving a Humvee…on his way to war.” Nichols, only twenty-one, “had joined the army our of a sense of patriotism after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.” Nichols saw extensive combat, the deaths of many friends and comrades, and was “blown off” the roof of a two story building. Although he came home without any physical injuries, Nichols has suffered nightmares, panic attacks, and a lack of concentration. He has been diagnosed with PTSD and may have some Traumatic Brain Injury. Nichols can’t hold a job and is now, with his family, homeless and living in the Muskegon veteran center. The theme of the article is that Nichols is an invisible hero, who served his country bravely and now lives under miserable conditions. To read the full article see:

http://blog.mlive.com/chronicle/2008/03/the_invisible_wounds_of_the_iraq_war.html

 

            Another related article my Google Reader account picked up was on the Wall Street Journal online edition titled “Wounded Soldiers see the Pentagon in Private Parade” featuring Cpl. Kenny Lyon who lost a leg in a mortar attack near Fallujah. WSJ reports “Cpl. Lyon was taking part in  a little known event called the Wounded Warrior march, which brings military personnel who suffer serious injuries in Iraq or Afghanistan to the Pentagon for a parade unlike any other.” It’s a simple event, closed to the public, in the corridors of the Pentagon, no speeches, no dignitaries and no cameras that gives opportunity to those at the Pentagon to honor and pay respects to soldiers and marines they had never met and who may never have a parade down Mainstreet. To read the full article, see:

http://blog.mlive.com/chronicle/2008/03/the_invisible_wounds_of_the_iraq_war.html

There were tens of millions of letters sent home by troops serving overseas during the Second World War. For most of these young people, the war was their first time overseas and, for most, their first encounter with the incredible range of brutality and evil actually practiced by mankind. I always tend to think of the typical American draftee of the 1940’s as be somewhat innocently naiveté, a product of the Judo Christian hard work / moral living ethic of the time.

Private Harold Porter, a medic in the U.S. Army’s 116^th Evacuation Field Hospital, was absolutely stunned and bewildered by the Nazi brutality he encountered when American forces liberated the Dachau death near Munich. His letter to his parents is contained in a remarkable book by Rod Gragg titled “From Foxholes and Flight Decks, Letters Home From World War Two.” The Waffen S.S. was in charge of the camp; when they fled in the faced of the advancing Americans they left behind many personal effects, including their elegant stationery embossed with the double lighting bolt S.S. logo. Porter wrote to his parents on some of this “liberated” letterhead, as reproduced above. In the letter he struggled to find word to describe the horrors of a Nazi concentration camp. “It is difficult to know how to begin,” he explained. “I have recovered from my first emotional shock and am able to write without seeming like a hysterical gibbering idiot. Yet, I know you will hesitate to believe me no matter how objective and factual I try to be. I even tried myself trying to deny what I am looking at with my own eyes…Atrocities must be seen before they can be believed.”

This inability to adequately express the full range of the atrocities discovered conflicted author Kurt Vonnegut in writing his novel “Slaughter House Five.” The author writes, substituting his fictional character Billy Pilgrim for himself, of his experiences of surviving the horrors and aftermath of the allied bombing of the German city of Dresden. Vonnegut evidently concluded that it would be impossible for him to write of his experiences in a conventional straightforward linear presentation that would just overwhelm the reader with the sheer magnitude of the horror and instead chose to write in the circular fashion that still manages to convey to the reader the life long impact of the war experience on the beholder.

Just as Vonneguts fictional character Pilgrim was amazed at the irony of another character, poor old Derby, being executed for having stolen a teapot from the ruins of Dresden, Harold Porter was astonished by the irony in touring the S.S. officer’s quarters in Cachau. “The surprising thing to me was the normalcy of his life,” Porter reported. “There were pictures of his wife, his little girls, …..yet within view of his office window was the mound of corpses beside the crematory.”

Two young poets stood out, mostly for their remarkable contrasts, in our readings from British World War I poets, Rupert Brooke and Wilfred Owen.  

Brook’s compact and beautifully written sonnet “The Soldier” (1915) inspired a generation of British to heroically march off to war with purpose and a romanticized vision of the value of sacrificing one’s own life for one’s country. The first four lines are the best known:

“If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed”

        Brooke was so revered that his poem The Soldier was read from the pulpit of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London on April 23rd, the day in which Shakespeare’s birthday is traditionally celebrated and, upon his (non-combat death) early in the war, Winston Churchill wrote his obituary in the Times.

          Owen was an entirely different poet, writing after the war (1920), his poem reflected the crushing disillusionment of so many of that generation who had fought and lived though the “Great War.” His best know poem “Dulce et Decorum Est” is full of haunting and horrific images of battle, including the torn bodies of dead and wounded men. Wrenching ironies abound with the contrast of the emotions of love, grace, beauty, and patriotism with brutally realistic images of graphic death and destruction. The irony is compounded by the structural quality of Owen’s poetry, well metered with beautiful rhyme and lyrics. Lines 15 to 28 reads:

 “In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,–
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,”       

      In reading this poem, one feels the engagement of the narrator by the sight of the horrifying death described. As gruesome and graphic as the poem is, the narrator seems to suggest that we would actually have to experience this for ourselves, or dream it in a “smothering dream,” to truly understand. 

           Brook’s biographer, Robert Means, compares the two poets by borrowing from the great English romantic Poet William Blake observing that “Brooke wrote Songs of Innocence(if not naïveté), while…Owen (and others) wrote Songs of Experience.” http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ltg/projects/jtap/tutorials/intro/brooke/.  Indeed, the line in Blake’s The Shepherd  “For he hears the lambs’ innocent call / He is watchful, while they are in peace” carries much the tone and nuance of Brooke’s “Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given; / In hearts at peace, under an English heaven” while Blake’s” The Tyger haunting query of “Did he smile his work to see, / Did he who made the Lamb make thee?” seems to echo completely the disillusionment in Owen’s work.

        Many of the English public were captivated by the poetry of Rupert Brooke at the outset of World War I. Brooke’s poetry reflected the country’s mood of patriotism and idealism and followed on the heels of the Romantic period. Brooke’s sonnets were almost used as a rallying cry for the war effort, reprinted in newspapers as recruiting aids for the services. Vera Brittain, like many of her contemporaries, was deeply influenced and motivated by Brooke’s and in her writings she often mentioned the poetry of Rupert Brooke, having initially been deeply moved by the striking of sacrifice and romanticized of death that Brooke wrote. Brittain explains “For the young to whom Rupert Brooke’s poems are now familiar as classics, it must be impossible to imagine how it felt to hear them for the first time just after they were written.”  The best known of Brooke’s poems, The Soldier, reads:

If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England’s, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.  

 For Brittain, her fiancee Roland Leighton’s death took any sense of romanticism out of dying and sacrifice writing, “Roland, I reflected bitterly, was now part of the corrupt clay into which war had transformed the fertile soil of France; he would never again know the smell of a wet spring evening in the early spring.”  The contrast from Burke’s “a rich earth a richer dust concealed” to Brittain’s “a corrupt clay” was a part of Brittain having “been overwhelmed by the horror of war without its glory”. The desolation of the loss was all encompassing “I wonder…if ever, ever I shall get over this feeling of bland hopelessness….Resistance requires an energy which I haven’t any of…hardly seems worth while.” Brittain’s writings at this time reflect the general erosion of her idealism and patriotism as she is confronted with the horrors and personal losses of the war, to the point where she writes, “Truly, the War had made masochists of us all.”   In her sorrow Brittain published a poem Verses of a V.A.D. of which the last two stanzas read:

“And I am worn with tears, for he I loved

Lies cold beneath the stricken sod of France;

Home has forsaken me, by death removed,

And Love that seemed so strong and gay has proved,

A poor crushed thing, the toy of cruel chance.

Often I wonder, as I grieve in vain,

If when the long, long future years creep slow,

And War and tears alike have ceased to reign,

I shall ever recapture, one again,

The mood of that May Morning, long ago.”

     Almost twenty years after writing the poem, Brittain wrote “The concluding speculation is answered now-not only for me but for all of my generation. We never have recaptured that mood; and we never shall. (Brittain 270)

I’m setting up this blog as a part of a class I’m taking at GVSU. As a “returning student” (mid 50’s) I’m several generations removed (by and large) from people who understand and create blogs so its all new to me. It’s and interesting challenge and I look forward to the learning experience. As a part of setting this up, I’ve subscribed to Goggle Reader and have the following links:

• McCain for President Site: I’m interested in following Mr. McCain’s views on support of the war, especially for responses to either political pressure as result of his presidential campaign or in response to some future unforeseen political or military event related to the current war.
• For the Google Reader news search I selected the topic of “:John McCain’s Views on the Iraq War” to see what others are saying on the subject.
• I read the Wall Street Journal (print edition) daily and will periodically refer to that and link to the online edition (excepting where a paid subscription is required)
• For general Iraq War and  Mideast I’m subscribing to feeds from the New York Times coverage
• I’m also using Google Reader to read      Al-Jazeera. In this way

Using these different news sources I feel I will get views across a wide spectrum on any given topic; from  conservative with the Journal, liberal with the Times, and an entirely different cultural perspective with Al-Jazeera

In addition I’m linking to several pod-casts and other blogs related to class interests, from Slate Magazines’ “The Sandbox” to a blog posting letters home from a WWI veteran. As this is my first experience reading blogs, I’ll follow up with more specifics as I become acquainted.