Effects[edit]

Nations customarily measure the 'costs of war' in dollars, lost production, or the soldiers killed or wounded. Rarely do military establishments attempt to measure the costs of war in terms of individual human suffering. Psychiatric breakdown remains one of the most costly items of war when expressed in human terms.

— No More Heroes, Richard Gabriel^{[29] Wikipedia}

So there it was, March 20, 2003,  President Bush declared war on Iraq.

Everyone seemed jubilant.  Not me.

Like the newly blinded in my once familiar home
I fingered the wallpaper ripped by cat scratching
the swollen door from recent rains now ill-fit for the door jamb.
The pitch of the roof askew as if by recent earth shifts imagined but real and irreversible.

I walked down the short path to the car port.
I walked back.  I felt sick to my stomach because I knew young people would die.
I picked up the phone and cancelled an important job interview
with a bewildered interviewer.
He clearly didn't get it.

So then it started.  Thank you for your service.
Thank you for

I couldn't say it then, I can't now. So I threw up.

There was the student who disappeared
during the Gulf War.  He said he always knew he was a warrior.
There was the young mother at the CSUSB Victorville campus
her husband overseas, she writing sterling essays about
I can't recall.  I fantasized about moving in with her until
if he returned.

Later it got worse.  Or better. Many military returned
cashing in their educational benefits.  Invisible scars
still there, they told of exotic places, funny now-not-then tales.
There was the sweet one with the TBI and the fleshy white scar on his brow;
the young mother at the pool removing both prosthetic legs
now, a water strider, she floated right along with her two kids.

I wait for it to end for the cortisol to stop churning in my gut
For all collectively en masse to IMAGINE
as one famous musician so valiantly put forth
a different alternative.

Meanwhile the "saber rattling" continues.
I wonder what Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr.
would say to this madness.
The military who are lucky enough to return stand tall
on the shoulders of an invisible population.
"Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori."
Can it keep churning out of control like this.
Can I find a way to thank you for
thank you            for?            thank
you?       thank....    
----- think for ourselves at last.