The Dover Test, the Baghdad Blues

I thought by this time I would be reasonably familiar with my emotions, the way you get to know the roads and streets around where you live.

But these soldier poems and songs from World War One, and the Civil War, the anti-war Disco song from Vietnam, have plunged me into a very unexpected bitter stew of anger and depression.

If there weren't yet another ghastly, senseless war -- two wars -- going on, these poems and songs would be interesting and educational literature and history. But I was unprepared for how powerful the poems were -- are. Some things have not changed a bit. Severed arms, lost legs, blindness, madness, grieving parents far outliving their children.

And I wish I was just getting my war news from CNN or BBC or The New York Times, or from people on the Internet as angry as I am. But Iraq and Afghanistan are not quick and little footnote wars, film of the Victory Parade at 11.

Neighbors, people I know, people whose faces and names I know ... these wars have begun to devastate their lives. To devastate, not simply severely inconvenience.

Our primitive emergency winter cot shelter is closed now, it runs from Halloween to May Day. Now its homeless guests are invited to sleep al fresco, in the woods and on a little sandbar island in the Connecticut River.

But I have started volunteering at the shelter again, and I really dread the next winter season. When I first began volunteering, many of our regular guests were that National Cliche, fucked-up Vietnam vets, fucked up on liquor, fucked up on smack, or just organically, holistically and permanently fucked up. That wasn't a surprise, I expected that.

But within a year, Desert Storm vets started showing up, kids just a few years past high school, every bit as fucked up as their old Vietnam colleagues. That was the most unpleasant of surprises, barely enough time after the Victory Parade to start victimizing and abandoning them.

Nostrabobus looks into the crystal, the mists part, and he sees Iraq and Afghanistan vets lining up when the shelter opens again on Halloween, a half-year from now.

The Dover Test: Now that Americans can look again, if Americans look at the images of the flag-draped coffins returning to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, will they keep supporting the Iraq and Afghanistan wars? Click on those images, it's your right to do so again.

Man. That's a lot of flag-draped coffins.

Once at the Bluebonnet Diner during Desert Storm, I overheard two older gentlemen at the counter -- they very possibly could have been vets themselves, perhaps of Korea, maybe WWII -- and one of them said: "It was different in Vietnam. Those guys were drafted. But these guys all volunteered."

So it's okay-er when volunteers die and come home in flag-drapped coffins, it's okay-er when they get maimed, or chemically poisoned, or drown in Post-Traumatic Shock Syndrome. It's okayer. There's no draft anymore. All these guys asked for it. They didn't have to join up. They knew what was coming.

The divorces will be okayer. The suicides will be okayer. The homelessness, the needle drug addiction, the disproportionate number of them in jail and prison -- they volunteered, they should learn to take personal responsibility for their actions.

Well, a small thing -- if the wars won't stop, I wish they'd keep Walter Reed Army Hospital open. It's a really fine hospital -- a rare thing for a military hospital. A lot of these women and men are going to need all the quality medicine Walter Reed has, and need it for a long time.

No poems, no songs, no links tonight, no MIDIs, no colors, no fancy typography. The urge, the very strong urge, to hop the Zeta Beam for Vleeptron, which hasn't had a war in -- Jeez, 1,404 years now. But no Zeta Beam for me tonight, no Time Machine. No Pizza.

Just the blues, the war blues, the neighbors' young relatives blues. The Baghdad Blues. The Kabul Blues. The Suicide Bomber Blues. (Fox News insists on calling them Homicide Bombers. That makes all the difference, I feel better when I hear them called that.) The Dover Air Force Base Returning Coffins Blues.

When will our VE and VJ Day be for these wars? When will the Armistice be signed? When will we get the Unconditional Surrender? Or when will we just march back to our own country over the bridge, or scramble onto the rooftop helicopters, and fly away, and then come home?

When will I wake up one morning because all the churchbells in Northampton are ringing and ringing for hours and hours? Will there be a day like that?