Category Archives: war poetry

Your excuse is invalid

Ever feel tired and just don’t want to go to the gym today, or circle the parking lot looking for a good spot so you don’t have to walk further to the door.

Well, when you do, think about CPL Todd Love.
(From an article from Col JR Bates ) :

“Corporal Todd Love doesn’t remember that last step he took. Actually, he remembers little of the events from 0710 on Oct. 25, 2010, or of the days and weeks thereafter. While on patrol in Sangin province, Afghanistan, he became an intended victim of a huge improvised explosive device (IED) buried by a Muslim terrorist alongside the main route leading from the village Love’s patrol had just passed.

Pressure detonated, the violent bone-rip­ping blast temporarily blinded and deafened all within 100 meters of the device. Most would feel the concussion of the shock wave and be thrown from their intended path, but as is often the case when at ground zero, few would remember actually hearing it. Memories, should there be any, would be a surrealistic slow-motion horror movie.

The road erupted. The earth shook, belch­ing fire, rock, equipment and body parts. The life of Todd Love would be changed dramatically forever.

The horrific blast vaporized everything into a pink mist from Cpl Love’s groin down. His left arm was mangled badly and hung uselessly from just below the elbow. Had it not been for the searing heat of the blast cauterizing his major blood vessels and arteries, he would have bled out quickly.

Moments later when his unit corpsman reached his position, it logically and un­derstandably was assumed that the cor­poral was dead. As per standard operating procedure of combat lifesaving, he was given shots of morphine to help cope with the unbearable pain that was sure to come should he possibly still be among the living. Reaching the site as the dust was settling, the corpsman noted that there were still signs of life.

Remarkably, Cpl Love regained con­sciousness. His first cognizant words were to inquire if he still had his manhood. The answer was, “Yes.”

Sometimes, thats all you need to keep going it seems.

CPL Love competing in a Spartan Race after his injures. He also surfs, scuba and skydives.

Todd Love Mud

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Determination means you really cant keep a good man down.

What is a Caparisoned horse

The Caparisoned horse is the riderless horse who follows the caissons (6 horses pulling the artillery cart which carries the casket of the fallen soldier) attached to the Old Guard (3rd Inf Rgt).  The caparisoned horse represents the soldier who will no longer ride in the brigade.  The caparisoned horse wears the standard Mc McClellan cavalry saddle, the sword and backwards boots in the stirrups, symbolizing the end of his tenure.  If you watch any footage of military funerals, you will see this type of horse.

Blackjack was one of the most famous of these horses.

Blackjack was one of the most famous of these horses.

He walked with JFK....

He walked with JFK….

Joe Sacco’s view of the Somme

If you are a student of war, you are aware of the Great War, also known as the War to End All Wars. Fought between 1914-1918 (or 1911-1922 if you include the Italic-Turkish/Balkan Wars and the Greco-Turkish and Russian Civil Wars), it was later eclipsed by another war fought just a generation later by most of the same cast of characters.

Today we just call it World War One, to put that later war into perspective.

And talking about perspective, Joe Sacco, a Malta-born cartoonist who came after both of these wars, did an amazing 25-foot long mural  of the Battle of the Somme.

The Somme, in 1916, was where the flower of British manhood died and a lost generation sprouted. In a front where gains and losses were measured in inches and feet, not miles, all or Europe bled white.

The first world war wasnt so much as won as it was lost.

And Saccos illustraions show a very deep and varied eye for the battlefield.

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They Finally Did it……

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ATLANTIC OCEAN (May 14, 2013) An X-47B Unmanned Combat Air System (UCAS) demonstrator launches from the flight deck of the aircraft carrier USS George H.W. Bush (CVN 77). George H.W. Bush is the first aircraft carrier to successfully catapult launch an unmanned aircraft from its flight deck. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Timothy Walter/Released)

What the Rebel Yell Really Sounded Like

The Smithsonian has this clip from the 1930s, Confederate veterans step up to the mic and let out their version of the fearsome rallying cry

Memorial Day….

Invictus (by the English poet William Ernest Henley (1849-1903)

Out of the night that covers me,

Black as the pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be

For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance

I have not winced nor cried aloud.

Under the bludgeonings of chance

My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears

Looms but the Horror of the shade,

And yet the menace of the years

Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,

How charged with punishments the scroll,

I am the master of my fate:

I am the captain of my soul.

 

The Beauty of a Gun

The Gun, by Vicki Feaver

Vicki Feaver (b. 1943) is a British poet. According to her listing in the Poetry Archive, “Feaver includes the stuff of everyday life in her poems – jam-making, gym classes, ironing – but grafts them onto the transgressive power of fairy-tale and myth.”

Author’s note: I lived in Brixton in central London for twenty years and though I sometimes heard gunshots I never actually saw a gun. But now living in Lanarkshire, Scotland, right in the middle of the country, I see lots of guns. Almost all the men seem to have a shotgun. And then my own husband got a shotgun and brought it into the house, and at first I felt very afraid of it and then gradually my whole attitude changed as I describe in this poem.

The Gun

Bringing a gun into a house
changes it.

You lay it on the kitchen table,
stretched out like something dead
itself: the grainy polished wood stock
jutting over the edge,
the long metal barrel
casting a grey shadow
on the green-checked cloth.

At first it’s just practice:
perforating tins
dangling on orange string
from trees in the garden.
Then a rabbit shot
clean through the head.

Soon the fridge fills with creatures
that have run and flown.
Your hands reek of gun oil
and entrails. You trample
fur and feathers. There’s a spring
in your step; your eyes glean
like when sex was fresh.

A gun brings a house alive.

I join in the cooking: jointing
and slicing, stirring and tasting—
excited as if the King of Death
had arrived to feast, stalking
out of winter woods,
his black mouth
sprouting golden crocuses.

from The Book of Blood (Jonathan Cape, 2006).
Listen to her read the poem.
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