Watermark: War | this is not a poem

To be 17, or 18, 19 or 20;
filled with certainties,
as we all are at that age.

To be given a rifle ("This is my weapon;
this is my gun!" the soldiers sang as they marched.
"This is for killing; this is for fun!")

What do they sing now, with women in their ranks?

Most of us here, in The West, grow up with only a slight idea
of what humans are capable of doing to one another.
We are innocents.

They are innocents, though they believe themselves to be
tough, trained, invincible. They are children.

Then they are thrown into the slaughterhouse,
and thrown back again.
And now, again.

Where the only protection, the only ground to stand on
is fierce loyalty to a chosen few,
and fierce rage at an amorphous many:
sometimes the enemy; sometimes the officers;
sometimes anyone near.

Sometimes themselves.

This fierceness may deepen to understanding, to compassion;
but more easily hardens into a coldness
cloaked with a kind of sentimentality,
a false nostalgia. They become vulnerable
to propaganda. To patriotism.

They are "broken".
This brokenness is intended;
it is planned, and mercilessly imposed upon them.
It makes them marines, soldiers, sailors.
It makes them men.

(What does it make the women?)

Some were broken to begin with.

Many come home in physical and metaphorical pieces.
Some will not come home.

Those of my generation remember, and that is what we fear
and fight and flail against as this war goes on and on.

How many -- any? -- of us were not directly affected
by the Vietnam war? Did not have husbands, cousins,
classmates, brothers, lovers,
go off to that changing and hardening place?

I had a lover, a Green Beret. Once, in the night,
I startled him awake. I no longer remember --
was this inadvertent? Was I teasing?

There was no time for fear, he had me down so fast
with his arm across my throat.

It was as he paced off the adrenaline and regret
that my fear and shock took hold, and I sat on the bed,
shaking in the sheets, as he told me:
"Never, never do that again. Never surprise a soldier
in the dark. I might have killed you. I nearly killed you."

This man never showed me any threat or violence
on any other occasion. One of the few regrets of my life
was to be so young, so foolish, so naive,
as to allow myself to be seduced away from this man.

He never spoke of the war.
Did I ask?
I don't remember.

And there are others -- men drunk in the park;
men closed like vaults in the therapy room;
the man who pulled his pistol from the glove compartment
on our first (drive-in movie) date --

Men who came home to spend their lives making amends,
without ever disclosing their self-named crimes.
Men with great authority, who organized marches,
and wore their medals on the line.

Men who swallowed their guns.

Now, today, it is possible to know no one in this fight.
To read the names, to see the faces in the paper,
and recognize none of them.

There have been losses in my town,
but I did not know them.

Am I to grieve these near strangers more than I grieve
those other, far strangers shredded by bombs;
displaced by fear; kidnapped, bound, tortured, and shot;
the women and their children in poverty,
selling themselves to survive; the men,
once proud, now merely -- angry?

Are they not also my neighbors?
My spouses, my children, my cousins, my lovers?

How does one take a stand in this --
conflict, engagement, fight, war?

Tell me, which side is which?

When I was 17, 18, 19 -- I knew. I was full of certainty.

Does it worry you, now, that our leaders --
leaders of my generation --
are so filled with certainty today? That they speak --

and send others to act --

with the arrogance of adolescence?

It is 1:33 in the morning here.
The air is full of smoke.
We are at war
and I don't know what to do.

[for fp]