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HOW HADITHA HAPPENED; WHY IT WILL
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"You
live like an animal. You learn to like killing. .. Hate civilians.
Can't trust the bastards. You hate taking prisoners. You'd rather
kill them. Why?" Read Vietnam vet Marc Levy's extraordinary
Primer on the Whys and Wherefores of PTSD and understand what
is happening in Iraq. PLUS
Andrew Lack on the incredible frauds of the bottled water industry.
Why you should drink tapwater out of a glass and save your money
PLUS Jeffrey
St Clair on the deadly secrets of America's oldest bomb factory
PLUS Chris Reed on Eros
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Now!
The man arrives
city worker to remove human feces
left by homeless
on Dreamland playground --
smeared on the wooden climbing structure,
under the tire swing,
in the corner of the tot-lot.
"Just off the boat from
Africa
and they don't know how to use a toilet."
That is my greeting from this worker with the thick Spanish accent
dragging shovel and trash barrel
to remove each pile
of intermixed excrement and toilet paper.
And I stare back at him.
And I say nothing.
The brown man maligns
the black man
as he cleans the shit
so that my white child can play
unsoiled in Dreamland.
And I do nothing.
My privilege to ignore
all of our shit
is also my failure
to become
fully human.
Suicide in the Jungle In the Steps of Siegfried
Sassoon
By TONY SWINDELL
We knew a happy grunt one time,
Young and green, his cause sublime,
With flag unfurled and crisp salute,
Godless Commies he would shoot,
No doubts for him of what to do,
'Til mortars fell and bullets flew.
In steaming jungle, sick and
drugged,
Sucked by leeches, stung by bugs,
Sleepless, exhausted, full of fears,
And aged beyond his tender years,
He hugged a frag, then pulled the pin,
No one spoke his name again.
You spineless bastards, stand
and bray,
Cheer soldiers on their deadly play,
Think of that boy, go home and pray
That your kids never go in dire harm's way,
Yeah, those other kids can die today,
They volunteered, didn't they?
They're happy grunts, aren't they?
The airstrike killed two
other men, two women, and a girl between the ages of 5 and 7
who were in the house, but only al-Zarqawi and his spiritual
adviser have been positively identified.
- Associated Press, June 10, 2006
Carried on radio waves,
news of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's death reached me
with unexpected force and in an unlikely place:
a Buddhist monastery.
It is a place where violence, in any form, is forbidden entrance,
and where vast internal spaces are mirrored
by the boundless natural landscape.
Nuns and monks, in simple robes, walk and work.
Radiant peacocks and peahens strut.
Students, aged six to eighteen, study in a school
that emphasizes character
and asks How can you be of service to the world? Above it all, like guardians, massive oaks and sycamores
spread their arms.
The news arrived as I fastened
my safety belt
and suddenly I felt anything but safer.
"Two five hundred pound bombs," a radio voice said,
enough explosive bite in their jaws to swallow a house
and leave a house-sized crater in a date palm orchard. Like a meteor, I thought. Sudden, suicidal, alien.
Al-Zarqawi, the disembodied
voice of terrorist threats,
his actual body, broken and bloody, now a war trophy.
Who doesn't want to see an
end to terror in Iraq,
an end to exploding cars and baby carriages,
to looking for missing relatives in morgues?
I stepped out of my car.
Standing there,
I more than half expected those great trees to swoon,
the ground to turn momentarily fluid.
Days before, Rachael had told
a story.
It seemed simple then.
"A bug flew into my eye while I played soccer.
For a full minute,
I stumbled across the field, half-blind, frantically blinking,
trying to free the bug,
holding my big, clumsy fingers at my side.
It was hilarious.
Teammates told me 'Just kill it,'
but I laughed and blinked
and the bug broke free."
Standing there alongside the
sycamores,
I could not reconcile the two images:
on the one hand, the Fighter Falcon and its ferocious bombs finding
their target
and on the other the foolish fourteen-year old, fumbling,
finding another way.
Standing there outside the
Buddhist elementary and secondary schools,
I couldn't help wonder which image would flower,
which image would seed our future:
the grown men in the F-16 following orders to kill
or the girl-woman, following a voice only she can hear.
David Smith-Ferri is the author of Battlefield Without
Borders: Iraq Poems, forthcoming this fall from Haley's Publishing.
He can be reached at: smithferri@pacific.net.
As If: Paradise for Mumford, Jensen
By ADAM ENGEL
Lead us
beyond frightened gardeners,
bootsteps deep to real;
Judges; land "Lords;"
"those who would be taken,"
suckered, ushered,
as if:
Love's squalor and ideal
pink codicils to freedom
-- even possibly --
betrayed with arbitrary fruit
as if:
my kingdom, "my kingdom for"
a hearse,
or Paradise for obscene visions,
barren buildings,
sealed deposit boxes
centuries to come:
sandals echo shadow halls
and no vocabulary to describe
the idiocy, the paper.
Adam Engel can be reached at bartleby.samsa@verizon.net
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Against Israel
By Michael Neumann
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