ManicDDaily

Damage  – All Kinds (On Reading About L.A. Times Photos of GIs Posed with Body Parts)

I started to write this morning about good guys–that if you want to be the good guy, you have to be the good guy. (Which in my garbled piece meant  not being the puerile guy or the vicious guy or the depraved guy.  Also that even if you have, at times, to make corpses–and a part of me hated to give even that concession–you could not play with the corpses.)

As I wrote, I pictured the faces of soldiers–the  roundness of youth framed by no-hair smiling sheepishly over camo’ed shoulders and too much gear.  Faces whose trained stocky bodies carried children, fed stray animals, tried to comprehend old men in headdress.  Sometimes, down cheeks hollowed, sometimes smeared with strain.  Soldiers so young each separate eyelash showed up dark and individual.

I saw smirks too on some of those faces.  (Smirks from other hateful photos came to mind.  Abu Graib.)   Smirks that turned  faces into baboon bottoms as they sat over the double folded limbs of prisoners, stripped.

More photos came in to the picture–faces marked with worry , loss; photos of metal shins, plastic knees; recent one of a vet, looking used up, lying on a rug beside his dog.  (Did I say loss?)

And though I myself still had a pretty clear idea about some of the parameters of good guys  – i.e.that  they cannot play with corpses, that they absolutely cannot play with corpses–all my words began to jumble in a kind of rubble, smoke, and all I really could picture were ricocheting pathways through the brain, ricochets maybe of bullets, but maybe only of power, loss, fear, rage.  Resulting in great damage, both direct and collateral.

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Having a very hard time today writing my 18th draft poem for National Poetry Month.   I am also posting this for Imperfect Prose.

What’s prompted this is today’s news about the 2010 photos (just coming out now in the L.A. Times) of  U.S. soldiers posed with body parts of Afghan suicide bombers.  (I haven’t seen the photos.)  

What I’ve come up with is not in any way intended to be disrespectful of our troops overseas.  I know that the soldiers in the photos are not typical, nor is their conduct.  But I’m first very worried  about whether that conduct (i.e. the photos) will put other soldiers in further danger.  And also I’m just concerned, sickened.  It’s a terrible situation, gone on too long, and for some deployed again and again–especially too long.