The Iraq War Isn't Poetic - Remembering Our Veteran's

The Ballad of Private Ross
By Gordon Lee Fain,

Just a coin toss,
Heads it was someone else, tails it was Ross,
A volunteer
Who went to Iraq, was helping to clear

Mines to a pit,
Then heard a discharge, felt the metal hit
His legs and face,
The fragments finding every open place

Of flesh and bone;
And when he woke, he lay in bed alone,
Amazed to find
That he had one leg cut off and was blind.

The whole town made
Sam Ross a hero: bagpipes, a parade,
A home they set
On top of a hill, but he could not forget

Insistent dreams
Of floating, in which his whole body seems
In peaceful flight
To burst apart in searing flames of light.

So he began
To drink, and young men took him in a van
From his house, down
To every bar and strip club within town,

New friends, who gave
Him everything his loneliness could crave,
Although he paid
For all the pills they popped and girls they laid;

And then one day,
His brother's girlfriend thought she heard him say
Cocaine's on the phone,
And in his fear that she would make this known

He pounded her door,
Pushed his way in, shoved her aside, and swore
He'd get her back,
Grabbed his lighter and set fire to the shack

In a drunken daze;
And when the firemen came to fight the blaze,
He screamed out -Stop! -,
Took off and swung his false leg at a cop

We end this tale
Of Ross, who tried to hang himself in jail,
With you and me:
Why him? Why not the rest of us? It's we

Who made him pay
For our own failure, took his hope away
So he now knows
The recompense of arrogance; but those

Who sent him there,
And we who should the blame and burden share,
Can't comprehend,
Can't bring this futile combat to an end,

Watching in despair
As helicopters tumble from the air:
More coins to toss,
More mangled corpses, more like Private Ross.

Hope for Our Troops.org built him this log cabin home








"Seventeen times of trying to commit suicide, I think it’s time to give up,"

Mr. Ross said.

"Lots of them were screaming out cries for help, and nobody paid attention. But finally somebody has."
Re-published in it's entirety from the New York Times:

Read Deborah Sontag's New York Times front page story:
Injured in Iraq, a Soldier Is Shattered at Home


Vote your thoughts on WAR

WILFRED OWEN "Dulce et Decorum Est"

"Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori - it is sweet and right to die for your country. In other words, it is a wonderful and great honour to fight and die for
your country "

...Is it Really?

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of disapointed shells that dropped behind.

Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime -
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.

1917