Suicide in the Trenches

[LanternWaste]

(I wrote this yesterday for my journal, but I've been overcoming my reticence to post personal stuff here, and I thought one or two of you may find it of interest. Also, I didn't know him very well at all-- despite having known his dad since about 1990, that's the way it is sometimes)


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The son of a friend of mine was scheduled to return home from his third tour of duty in Iraq next month. But he shot himself in the head on Saturday morning in Baghdad. No note. No last phone call to make things right. No vocal manifesto. Nothing at all dramatic... he was simply there, and then he wasn't.

The last time I'd seen him was at the bar-b-q at the summer of 2005. That was just prior to his enlistment. Despite his perception of me as a "bleeding-heart" liberal, he asked me if I knew of any poets who concerned themselves with war. He had recently been turned onto the poems of ee cuumings, and wondered if there were other poets just as accessible in nature.

He's a (sorry-- "he was...") a smart kid. The kind of kid that's too damn smart for his own good; you know-- the kid who "knows" everything until life teaches him differently. That was me until I hit thirty. So I kinda knew where he was coming from, and plied my subtle and nefarious "socialist" ways on him using the venues of classic literature and classic film.

I suggested Sassoon, the unsung World War One poet, to him. Sassoon hated war almost as much as he loved duty. He was caught in the middle of two very strong concepts-- one competing with the other.

He had been decorated over and over again. Even went so far as to capture one of the trenches in the Hindenburg line single-handedly. A real soldier's soldier. What we like call "gung-ho".

But, one day while at home in England on leave, Sassoon became fed up with the slaughter, and decided to "sit the rest of this out". He wrote a declaration of his intent which was then published in all of southern England's dailies. It was even read aloud during a session of Parliament. He was conveniently diagnosed with shell-shock to avoid any "unpleasantness".

But the machinery of war is intractable-- to deny it, and all its accompaniments is to bid adieu to your birthright and your honor. And Sassoon knew that. He had read accounts in the dailies of more and more of his comrades dying whilst in recovery. One here. Two there. Three more in an ambush

His guilt overcame his pacifism. He eventually went back to the war and was soon thereafter killed by friendly fire. But he had written long before his death that he was already a tragedy-- that the mere act of picking up a rifle in the name of nationalism begets a tragedy regardless of who aims the weapon, or who the weapon is aimed at.



SUICIDE IN THE TRENCHES

I knew a simple soldier boy
Who grinned at life in empty joy,
Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,
And whistled early with the lark.

In winter trenches, cowed and glum,
With crumps and lice and lack of rum,
He put a bullet through his brain.
No one spoke of him again.

You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you'll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go.

~ Sigfried Sassoon ~

[midnight]

1. So sad, that someone whom you know, lost their

will to continue the hell-known as Bush's war. Bring them home.

[babylonsister]

2. So sad, so unnecessary. That simple poem says it all.

My condolences to your friend.