Wars Are So Different...
Yet Somehow the Same |
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Different wars from beginning of time
Still voice the same common combat rhyme
Borne in raucous fever across different horizons
Boasting of different grisly weapons
Across a score of years
Reminiscent of history's cares
Every one designed to dissipate humanity
Perpetuate the insanity.
Soldiers of innovative wars invent new toys
Modern gadgets for use on different boys
On different geography, varied weather's climatology
Topography making for different battlefield choreography
Yet the same hatred's in greed
Or need
Offer a killing chore
To all wars righteous man claims to deplore.
A nation's sons irately bare might vindictive
Fearful, awful, wrathful, abrasive
Both camps in dreadful fight...
Declare divine right
Always right...
Vengeful deities ever on their side
From lands of milk and honey's war-stained tide
To verdant hills nourished by innocent blood
Plant our sons beside fraternal brotherhood.
Through dawns of traditions enmity does pour
Innocent blood shed by historic lore
From Germany, Italy, far-off Japan
A decade of warring in intemperate Vietnam
From Korea to Rhodesia
Rwanda, Sudan, The Falklands, Somalia.
Blood by capricious hate spilled in Liberian Monrovia
Racially motivated apartheid in South Africa
Afrikaans sanctioned policies of discrimination
Political, legal, and economic separation...
Not unlike America's segregation.
Matters not what fills different uniforms
Where on different battlefield rituals deadly rite performs
Elite society fastens the triggers
Right and left producing patriotic figures
Brandishing flags unfurled
Bowing to mankind's nature to police the world
Wanting everybody to believe like them true.
Leap headlong into the gaping maw of war ensue
Build the guns young princes fire
Wringing hands as body counts grow higher.
Far too often
Masters of war with malice and greed
Gamble away a nation's precious seed
Put in boyish hands a loaded gun
Hiding behind far-off setting sun
Hiding from paternal eyes
As fatally
Surely
The fast bullet flies...
War's winds cause sabers rattling the Judas lie of old
Cast by whispering innuendoes in truth bandied in fables
told
Imposed upon soldiers stalwart, courageous, verily bold
By governments shouting patriotic lies to deceive
Young soldiers wanting so badly to believe
Go marching into the unknown so gullibly
Brave sons with the power of confidence incredibly
Wage a nation's wars with dauntless might formidably.
Under a new law the very elect bred...
Trained to fight until dead...
Conditioned bullmastiff
Sent strutting to town a new sheriff.
To instill God-given precepts
Send forth God's servants
Soldiers well known to be right
In the name of morality the craven to fight
Battling through depraving depths of war immoral
Harboring holes in the soul by war left dismal.
Peoples push with might in greed abusive
Shoving to supplant a people from lands native
Trampling rights by force of numbers aggressive
By might of numbers usurp from those weaker
As squabbling neighbors bicker
For another's lands lusting
Grass greener on the other side of the fence coveting
For purple mountain's majesty wishing
Brought guns against arrows to a new frontier obsessive
Ripping right from innocence gung-ho na�ve.
While mighty men sing Eucharist hymns benedictive
Both ancient and modern battle scars eternally leave
Need for healing...
Wars in mankind always breeding
Souls torn ragged again and again by depravity
Spent forging liberties in the name of morality.
O, wars may have differing grim logistics
But all bear similar, macabre statistics.
Hostility's fraught with danger uncouth
This wastrel of fair youth...
Cruelly destroys princely minions
Hope of generations
But searching for glory-filled adulations
Sent nefariously on combat missions
Men from both sides forever gone
Brightest virtue's flowers used but pawns
Lost forevermore to abusive devil's spawns.
Where time and again fire and brimstone rained
Freedom's gained...
Freedom's lost...
Left bloodied in the holocaust
Taken by that fabled grain harvester
Death's unholy grim reaper
Who maliciously cuts off people's lives
Our boys' futures mow with long-necked scythes
Under his blade naught but futility
Generations lost eternally...
So it behooves us to ask before we resort to guns...
Before we wager with God our sons
Is it worth it...? Is there another way?
Where we don't have to so egregiously pay?
Dreams of heaven's peace defray...?
For wars are fought
That are both good, and bad...
Both sources of pride wrought
Or tactics � senselessly sad...
We must be righteously selective;
Of the past � reflective...
Choose strategies formed by facts discriminative
Using discerning wisdom, contemplative. |
By
Gary Jacobson
Copyright 2003
Listed
December 30, 2010 |
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About
Author...
In 1966-67, Gary Jacobson served with B Co
2nd/7th 1st Air Cavalry in Vietnam as a combat infantryman and is the recipient of the Purple
Heart.
Gary, who resides in Idaho writes stories he
hopes are never forgotten, perhaps compelled by
a Vietnamese legend that says, "All poets are
full of silver threads that rise inside them as
the moon grows large." So Gary says he
writes because "It is that these silver
threads are words poking at me � I must let them
out. I must! I write for my brothers who cannot
bear to talk of what they've seen and to educate
those who haven't the foggiest idea about the
effect that the horrors of war have on
boys-next-door."
Visit Gary Jacobson's site for more information
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