A Sonnet Trilogy

G I Joe (the movie): Useless. It's all useless. I was once a man. A man! -Cobra Commander

In 1914, at the outset of World War I, Rudyard Kipling urged his own son to join the British military. One week after his son enlisted, he was dead. Overwhelmed with grief, Kipling wrote "Epitaphs for War."

If any question why we died
Tell them because our fathers lied.

I

What makes the young men want to volunteer?
(as it’s been ever since sons brandished spears).
As a career?—Joe just died, did you hear?
With a father who knows—Dads hide their tears—

Does their own mortality seem not real;
not count as much as the challenge to kill,
and have it lauded; add feel good appeal?
Iraq is a patriot’s poison pill!—

Mom’s inconsolable, (a sibling tries),
and the family’s a fatality, too;
tethered with their brave boy love till he dies,
their home-front Wrong War! fight unties—they’re through!

Gung ho to go, the odds are good he’d die,
though death doesn’t settle their issue: Why?


II

Joe was a genuine one of his line
of forebears who fought, since Independence;
felt honored and duty-bound to align
with his blood’s urge of offense for defense.

Dad knows a thing or two of basic drives;
Spouse, tug-of-war attention for his love;
each expects stars and hearts and he survives;
to share the badges, not the end thereof.

As for his mother, she’s an Army wife,
it’s not about the Army; it’s this war;
unworthy of her loss, his wasted life;
her moral man who never asked “What for?”

Joe trusted, trained to act and not ask “Why?”
Believed he’d get the other guys—Not die.


III

If only his country had been as fair,
and in the right, as was his faith in it;
as his efforts up to his dying prayer—
he’d surged a Baghdad block when he was hit.

A soldier smarter than critics expect,
he kept up with it, the antiwar case,
what with his mother’s, (who had his respect)—
(her kind of support some reckon off-base.)

If he had his own doubts, he never said.
Understood politics is not the same
as patriae—that love can be misled—
and not to back one’s buddies brings self-blame.

More troops must die “to honor troops who die”?,
And so… Joe’s sacrifice can satisfy?



© Helga Ross 2007.