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In response to this sickening story which came via wood s lot, I can only weep, and hold on to the thought that there is hope and peace out there, somewhere.

And I can also post this poem from John Morgan’s book The Arctic Herd which sort of takes me to where those Marines are now in a different way.

Ambush

A light with the richness
of cream pours over the bar.
Slack night. I sip a glass
of beer remembering who I think
I am and then forgetting.
“Killing’s more direct than talk,”

he says, says he could do it still
but what’s the use? His breath’s
a heavy metal stink about like dirt
or the wide circles
of waiting he pledged allegiance to
before his birth.

Camped in the Asian dark,
sick on his first patrol,
he tells me how they wouldn’t
talk to him, his alien platoon
that first night out. Then
something like a finger beckoning.

He turns, hears in his middle ear
a bird’s frail tune,
thick eons shouldering over oceans of recall.
With hardly time to think
he’s off his stool, rolling
in a fit of peanut shells and drool.

The mind at war
has got its reasons. Plunging
in a sink of need,
he’s there as well as here
hands tensed around his snub-nosed,
sharp-toothed pet,

and suddenly I could do
with one less beer. Tomorrow
if he lives he’ll
burn a village, be a vet.
All wars are fought by country
boys used to this long road.

This war is stupid, a bloody waste of life.