a couple of things I wrote back in Basic (part 1)
since I've decided to open up the archives here is the first of two bits of military poetry
Know this. We do not die in droves but by degrees, by noonday heat and sweat and nighttime freeze and missing home's first springtime chirping birds, or our first child's first words, and touch of lover's skin. We do not die, not most of us, that is, warded by a constant eye on which one of the passers-by might wish to do us in. Is this not death? For dead men go to hell, which surely must have sand and smell, and beating sun and men with guns who do not mean us well.
Know this. We do not die in droves but by degrees, by noonday heat and sweat and nighttime freeze and missing home's first springtime chirping birds, or our first child's first words, and touch of lover's skin. We do not die, not most of us, that is, warded by a constant eye on which one of the passers-by might wish to do us in. Is this not death? For dead men go to hell, which surely must have sand and smell, and beating sun and men with guns who do not mean us well.