EXPERIENCING THE UNKNOWN
BETWEEN WAR AND POETRY
Tony Aiello
If
the “secret” of a text lies in wanderings, ellipses, and the unspoken; and
in the opposite of these things; or in synthesis, dispersion, or prolixity,
then the secret in literature is both everywhere and nowhere—spoken but
unconfessed, heard but not understood, communicated but drowned in noise.
The following poems create a distance between the depiction of the
experience of war and the interior world of the narrator and also between
what the reader reads and what the reader comprehends. Ultimately the
secret isn’t what is hidden from the narrator or audience: it lies in the
unassimilability, the radical otherness of the experience—the fact that
the experience cannot be understood according to any training or past
experience outside of war, but can only be dealt with as an aftereffect,
much like a scar. So if these poems act like scars, the narrator presents
the scar for view and shares the experience of the wound and the reader
sees the scar and can know what caused the wound, but what remains unknown
and unknowable is the difference between the transmission of the
experience and the reception of it. The secret exists in that space—much
like irony, where the “secret” exists in the space between what is said
and what is understood, the confusion lying not in what is said, but in
the fact that its opposite could very well be the intended meaning.
Adding to that distance, then, are
the various levels of coding used in order both to accurately portray
events and their effects and to keep the reader unbalanced in her attempt
to understand those same events and effects. So the language remains
aggressively military and metaphorical, intensely local in its purview.
Likewise, Taoist philosophy and pieces from Zen Buddhist texts highlight
the gulf between the calm stasis of the haiku moment and the frenzy of
combat, while at the same time bridging the distance between ancient
Eastern philosophy, religion, and art, and the contemporary West—so that
firing a rocket launcher becomes the act of threading a needle, a metaphor
found in a training manual written around 1645 by perhaps the greatest of
the samurai, Miyamoto Musashi—an accomplished poet, caligrapher and
painter, and founder of a school of sword guard designers.
The
Five Things
1. Fire—Direction—Control
The discipline to shoot a man
lies not in the trigger finger,
a quick jerk more reflex
than act of will, but in the eyes
that must be taught not to see
a man holed by bullets fall
spitting blood-soaked thrashing dead.
You must practice this often.
The discipline is a needle, the act
of entering grid coordinates &
azimuths,
flipping the red safety cover up
to press fire is the thread
that follows. We practiced
constantly, but when rockets launch
the world bursts with flame &
poisoned
smoke, everything roars, shudders
so deep we sometimes tore
at the launcher doors to escape
our own strength. In training,
discipline means cohesion,
unity of men against fire;
but in the shit, with louvers
slanted shut,
command hatch buttoned down,
the SPLL dressed to kill, it’s every
man
in his own helmet, communication
drowned & eccentric, concentric
effort
lost, reduced to holding on
to a voice inside saying wait.
The firing done, rockets gone,
the crew sweat-soaked, training
takes hold & it’s time to reload,
to release the death that takes
place without & within; to see past
soldiers dying fast or long before
your eyes
or somewhere beyond rifle sights
takes patience & time. In basic
& advanced individual training,
sergeants drilled into us
ten thousand things that remain
even today in muscle memory:
ceremonies of measured movement
rituals required to fire a rifle
barked commands that make
the launch of rocket bomblets
& metal frenzy a matter
of practiced mechanical acts.
The aim of training is unity
of purpose, the ability to see
the complete picture through the
mist
of a thousand shattered pieces.
With discipline, the moment
impossible to unremember
becomes the one thing you will not
see.
You must study all ways.
2. A View of the Road
The way was crowded today
with miles of GI’s driving
through Al Qayşūmah
past Hafar al Bāţin
following the Trans-Arabian Pipeline
straining the straightway
in deuces and 5-tons loaded with
MRE’s,
extra MOPP gear, med supplies,
pallets & cases & crates
of shells bullets grenades;
HEMTT tankers full of fuel
or water, wreckers & rocket
carriers with cranes. The low-boys
hauled a parade of slow tracks
& tanks, outpacing M-1A’s
racing Bradley’s fast-flanking
M109 self-propelled’s, 577’s,
rocket-launching SPLL’s,
APC’s riding the roadsides. And all
so long along the way, & everything
altogether-happening-at-once
so that we drove like flocks of
birds
or Bedouins with camel herds—feeling
without seeing the distance between
one truck & the next. Learning to
steer
during even those free-float
moments when spring-loaded
shocks threw my HEMTT
aloft, & everything not bolted
jounced & jolted, the bruising
& bouncing at times recalling me
or breaking my hold of the road,
& my driving mind found
a fragile focus that made the way
concrete, the procession
of moving troops undefined.
But when the 101st
overflew
us all, their rotors chopped thin
winter air & Birdie called out
over the radio to say every
fucking helo in this man’s army
was pounding a battle cry
into his head. The Iroquois
OH-58D’s UH-60 Black Hawks
Apaches Huey’s Chinooks
added their swarm to our mob
as everyone poured forward
along & above the road
until the whole world seemed
kicked-up, full of dust.
3. Floodwaters
The weather means the season
changed to rain, but Şahrā’ al
Hijārah remains
brown beneath sprouting green;
the patches barely mask
the desert’s lack, & no grass
grows on our bunkers.
Three weeks since digging in
after pulling out—the weather piling
on
as we loaded HEMTT’s & SPLL’s with
gear:
arms lifted in a downpour, hope
sodden
just one day into the year.
Now two months gone
& two base camps behind,
like winter growth wind-slashed
by spring rains, we stay close to
the ground,
maintain our vigil through
below-frozen nights,
blink away the sweat of border-days.
Even when I leave each morning
to check my HEMTT, its rockets,
run the engine to warm me,
or drift to Bill & Bull’s bunker
to talk of home or going over,
or deliver maps bearing north to the
Euphrates
& on to the next hole with news of
direction,
it’s always the weather we return
to.
Like last night when Tebbe said,
I’m so blind, Achmed could walk
right up, look me in the eye
& I wouldn’t see—then took
my pawn with his rook. Check, he
said
& I did: outside the red glow
of our flashlit circle: all around:
up to see stars rubbed black
before realizing it must be clouds.
In the sabkha we occupy, surrounded
by sanded ridges, a steady rain
means a gathering of spill-waters
run off from dunes through wadis to
us
bunked down—or like Tebbe & me:
awake with a machine gun, eyes
to the surface we could see, the
pieces
under a heavy lens, the first drops
as our watch stopped. We collected
the game, our rifles & webgear,
picked
a dark way to our hole for sleep
while it came down. Slow waters
flowed round the battery.
Sand-bagged
berms unable to contain the weather
collapsed in noise & heaves. I
broke
surface like a swimmer seeking air;
soaked,
I slogged through to higher ground,
& now wait as the morning
quarterlight
shows wind rippling across lakescape.
4. Assault Dimensions
The terrain cannot be seen
in rocks that lie abrasive
in layers atop grit & dirt
that makes the land here.
Jags tear our tires
while the clouds we raise
like wind ruin our view,
& the true terrain escapes us.
As when I landed expecting
to depart for sands days after
stepping
into a heat-blasted kingdom
of deserts I didn’t know or yet
understand until the topography
turned around as summer settled
& sun bled to black winter
nights when we didn’t sweat
the terrain though straining to see
in darkout drive, distance dwindled
to three meters between vehicles,
dimensions set in tints of
night-vision-green.
The day we passed through
the barrier, Randy & I shook hands
before mounting up; all the dunes
hid
in clouds for hours after Colonel
Thrasher broke radio protocol
to welcome us all to Iraq.
In our sector, 2nd
Platoon crossed over
the border’s berm in a shamal;
we pushed past the wind’s last sands
to a black-blue sky above a plain
covered with ragged runs
of rocks forever-in-all-
directions—the terrain
exposed & us in it. Our tracks
flowed fast across the flats.
The Euphrates is where it began.
The land rippled circuitous.
Tributaries dry, with twists.
Alpha became bogged in the loose
sands of comprehensive dunes
while Bravo tore up
their half-mile sides
to enter the River Valley firing
as Charlie scattered under Iraqi
artillery, someone on the radio
begging for a tow as a howitzer
walked rounds down to him.
Launchers in the valley firing fast.
His voice in static drowned &
cracked.
5. February Forecast
The leadership never imagined
I would hike through hedge country
to sit near power lines
watching wind-heavy high grass
covered in drifts, whited-out green
in clumps like small dunes,
in a snowed field with upturned face
to ask forgiveness from men I helped
to kill. I’ve burned years
reclaiming
months in sand & sun
with men I no longer know;
wasted days with Drill Sergeant
Graves saying, you will
want to understand
the terms which describe
authority, as he pulled
hand to brow, arm angled horizontal
to teach us to salute; retraced
routes through those hundred
hours thousands of times;
always returning to the seconds
required to aim to shoot
with eyes direct, as when saluting
or staring on watch. The leadership
spoke strategy, but our tactics
were rockets & steel rain
blasts of shrapnel like a tearing
blizzard
the air itself a shredder; we
maintained
distance, fought behind a mask
of Bradley’s that once lagged
& the Guard hit us: our M2 escort,
turret turning, blazing tracers;
Davies
pumping M203 rounds, explosions
like crushing embraces
that continue to wake me
nights my own mask slips.
The leadership waxed expansive
but I try to pare it down, see
things
drop away like a wadi cuts
a landmark into desertfloor;
a desert bowl too wide for sight to
fill
until full of Bedouin herds
& later, Republican Guards
defined by M-60 sights.
Storms always, on the horizon
a bermline stretching home.
Midway to Iraq at midday:
a long road trip, a black
turbulence not yet in range,
driven toward a moment
I refused to shoot—
& am what I was when not warstuck,
when I wasn’t defined by closing
eyes, before I learned to wait.
© 2005 Tony Aiello
