A Bummer

There is, of course, a difference between being anti-war and being anti-this-particular-war. The realities of war, however, seem to be universal, repetitive, unchanging. In 1972, Michael Casey published a book of poems called Obscenities with regard to his service in Viet Nam. One of those poems, A Bummer is, I'm sure, something that might hit a nerve today; something that might be true, so true as our boys/girls risk their lives in the hell that is Iraq:

We were going single file
Through his rice paddies
And the farmer
Started hitting the lead track
With a rake
He wouldn't stop
The TC went to talk to him
And the farmer
Tried to hit him too
So the tracks went sideways
Side by side
Through the guy's fields
Instead of single file
Hard On, Proud Mary
Bummer, Wallace, Rosemary's Baby
The Rutgers Road Runner
And
Go Get Em -- Done Got Em
Went side by side
Through the fields
If you have a farm in Vietnam
And a house in hell
Sell the farm
And go home

track: tracked vehicle
TC: Track Commander


And, this from Thomas Hardy:

"The Breaking of Nations"

Only a man harrowing clods

In a slow silent walk,

With an old horse that stumbles and nods
Half asleep as they stalk.

Only thin smoke without flame
From the heaps of couch grass:

Yet this will go onward the same

Though Dynasties pass.

Yonder a maid and her wight
Come whispering by;

War's annals will fade into night

Ere their story die.



Dubya's war is so pitiful, costly -- oh, so terribly costly -- and for what? Have we subdued the great leader of the Axis if Evil, the Evildoer himself whose resources were so potent, so omnipotent, so pervasive that his retreat, his final flight from the invasion of the infidels ended up in a hole in the front yard of some otherwise trailer trash Iraqi homestead?

Oh, the enemy, he is ourselves.