[lit-ideas] Tuesday Poem
- From: "Stan Spiegel" <writeforu2@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>, "Alisa Spiegel" <ASpi1298@xxxxxxx>, "David Cowen" <davidcowen@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>, "Bonnie Spiegel" <Bonnie121W@xxxxxxxxxxx>, "Margaret Spiegel" <MSpiegel@xxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 01 Jun 2005 08:17:55 -0400
Here's a poem, a Monday poem, I nearly overlooked in the Times yesterday.
May 30, 2005
Over There
By KEVIN C. JONES
Carmichael, Calif.
ON this Memorial Day, more than two years after the invasion of Iraq, American
troops are still fighting and dying. Their deaths have become a staple of the
evening news, a permanent column on the front page. Most of the time, we don't
even notice anymore. Until death touches someone we know, or someone we used to
be.
On the morning of Jan. 26, while I rush my daughters through their bowls of
cereal, brush their hair and get them ready for school, I learn that a CH-53E
Super Stallion helicopter has crashed in western Iraq, killing 31 men.
Twenty-six of them are part of my old unit: Company C, First Battalion, Third
Marine Regiment, stationed at Marine Corps Base Hawaii, Kaneohe Bay.
Later, at work, I struggle to explain how surreal it is to learn that marines
from the infantry company I served with in the Persian Gulf war have been
killed in this one. I sit at my desk, processing insurance claims, surrounded
by gray cubicle walls instead of sandbags and dirt, behind a computer instead
of a machine gun, thinking about the business card from the recruiter tucked in
my wallet. He says there's a slot for me in a reserve unit if I want it, and
that I'd get a chance to go overseas again, to be part of something larger and
greater than myself. To go to the war. I think about what my daughters would
say if I told them that I'm leaving, and that I might not come back. I wonder
how to justify it to myself if I don't go.
My co-worker looks over at me from his desk and says, "Did you know any of
them?"
No, I didn't know them.
What I know is the base where they lived. The way they ran up K.T., Kansas
Tower, this giant hill in the middle of the base, gasping all the way to the
top. I know the view from the apex, overlooking the vivid blue of Kaneohe Bay,
a rainbow in the background. I know how good a cool breeze felt when they
reached the top, after running past the flight line, beyond the beach where
their leg muscles burned and their feet sank into soft, warm sand. I know what
drives a marine, at the end of his endurance, choking back vomit as the
battalion runs in a huge formation, to suddenly break ranks and run to the man
carrying the Colors, the battalion flag, and take it from him, sprinting around
800 marines in a giant circle before returning it and dropping back in line. I
know what they smelled like when they were sweating out the beer they drank the
night before.
But I didn't know them.
I know what they felt like when they were released on liberty at 1600 on a
Friday afternoon. How much time it took to iron their clothes and clean up for
a night out. I know how many guys can be squeezed into a subcompact car, piling
on top of each other for a ride down to Waikiki Beach and Kalakaua Avenue. I
know what it's like to spend an entire paycheck in 48 hours, buying drinks for
impossibly beautiful women from all over the world who all seem to be in the
same bar on the same night.
I know the feeling of being thousands of miles from home, afraid because war is
coming soon, and then a girl smiles and, for a moment, everything is O.K. I
know how a woman like that can make the toughest marine feel 16 again, kissing
a girl for the first time. I know how to get all the way across the island back
to the base from Waikiki, or Honolulu, with no money and only the other guys in
my platoon to help me. I know what it is to become brothers with men you never
would have met in the civilian world, and to remember them for years after
they're gone.
But I didn't know them.
I know what it feels like to patrol for days without sleep in Molokai, and at
Schofield Barracks and Camp Pendleton; in Okinawa, and the Philippines and
Saudi Arabia. I know the industrial claustrophobia of being on a ship, packed
in with 40 other marines in a space the size of a studio apartment. The smells,
the jokes, the way the surface of the helicopter flight deck cuts into your
palms when you do push-ups. I know what it's like to comfort marines when their
wives or girlfriends leave them with only a note and a bogus explanation and
they want answers, but there aren't any.
But I didn't know them.
I know what it's like to ride in a CH-53 helicopter. The way it shimmies as it
thunders over the terrain below, a crouched panther waiting to strike, marines
in the back, heads bowed, trying to catch some sleep, never knowing when they
might get another chance to rest. Marines dreaming of their families, of home.
No, I didn't know the marines who died, but I miss them just the same. I go to
work each day, safe in my cubicle, checking the news for word of the war dead,
looking for friends and thinking about that recruiter's card in my wallet.
Kevin C. Jones served as a marine from 1990 to 1994.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/30/opinion/30jones.html?pagewanted=print
June 1, 2005
The War in Iraq: 'I Can't Understand' (3 Letters)
To the Editor:
Re "Over There," by Kevin C. Jones (Op-Ed, May 30):
Each day, I read the names of the dead soldiers in Iraq. On Monday, it was nine
names, and I think of this terrible tragedy that we were led into through lies
and deception.
I can't understand why there isn't more protesting about the war, the torture
of prisoners and the abandonment of the Geneva Conventions.
I was an antiwar activist during the Vietnam War, in part motivated by a
senseless family death. But aren't these young men and women our American
family? Shouldn't we all care about these tragic losses?
And what about those in Iraq? Who knows how many die each day? The situation
seems bleak and depressing as far as the eye can see.
I am waiting for America to wake up and demand answers and changes from our
government. Do we need the draft to be reinstated to stop watching TV and head
to the streets?
Susan Schwalb
New York, May 30, 2005
?
To the Editor:
Kevin C. Jones's article is a fitting tribute on Memorial Day. The number who
have lost their lives answering our country's call is staggering.
And what about the forgotten soldiers who died fighting so that we would have
an America? All our dead soldiers had lives, histories, a past; but alas no
future.
And of course, all soldiers leave loved ones behind to grieve. So let us never
forget their sacrifice that allows us to live our own lives.
Kenneth Dunn
Spring Valley, N.Y., May 30, 2005
?
To the Editor:
While reading Kevin C. Jones's poignant article about the Marines, I wanted to
reach out to him as I would to my son and say, "Don't go there."
I mean that literally.
As I continued reading, I kept thinking that he had decided to go back into the
Marines and was almost afraid to get to the end of the article. I wanted to
tell him to take that recruiter's card and throw it away.
His description of life in the Marines was the most poetic that I have ever
read. And yet his description of his morning routine with his young daughters
was equally lovely.
Kevin, please. Don't go there!
Eileen Sharan Smith
Great Neck, N.Y., May 30, 2005
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