But that's not the half of it,
War makes you dead.
And you were dead,
Never partly dead.
It was not courage,
They were too frightened to be cowards.
They died so as not to die of embarrassment
A mere matter of falling,
Yet no one ever fell.
You can't change what can't be changed,
There were rules.
But the war wasn't all that way.
The war wasn't all terror and violence.
They made themselves laugh.
They found jokes to tell.
Well, you'd think,
This isn't so bad.
Garden of Evil
They'd say.
The place talks.
Nam - it truly talks.
You come over clean
And you get dirty
And afterward
It's never the same.
I agree that war is truly hell. It combines all of human misery into one act. In this way, it defines what is worst in the world.
ReplyDeleteThis poem really captures the tone of Tim O'Brien's writing and illustrates how war contradicts itself, and cannot be described as one thing.
ReplyDeleteThis poem did a phenomenal job of describing the paradox of war, while also capturing O'Brien's style. Great job.
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