PREFACE: As Howard Zinn points out in Artists in Times of War, nothing brings out class division as clearly as military service and war. Military rank is basically a caste system in which the wealthiest never serve and the poorest have— no choice. They are drafted, or join in war or peace, for the same reasons I did. They need a job and money. They want to learn a trade. They need that G.I. bill in order to get the education they can’t otherwise afford. It’s my feeling that the current administration, most of whom inherited their considerable wealth and have never served their country in active duty, have little understanding or compassion for the common enlisted soldier or their families.

Subtraction
George Bush can’t count in single digits.
If he could he would know that, at the rate of two per day
we are losing 14 soldiers every week
that’s 56 lives a month
672 men and women a year.
More than twenty-two hundred sons and daughters have already died.
But George can only count in millions and billions.
Numbers in the hundreds, even thousands, are lost on him.
He and his administration deal in multiple gains, not losses.
They have never learned to subtract.
Here is a math lesson for you, Mr. Bush:
A nineteen year old boy sits with his small unit
in an armored car on the edge of an Iraqi village,
on the edge of his seat, on edge period
because last night Iraqi rebels blew up his buddy’s group
where they guarded boundaries with night goggles, M-16’s,
and hand grenades none of which did them any good.
This is occupied Iraqi territory, nothing like North Carolina,
and he remembers that old joke picture called
“Indians in the Desert” where nothing
is visible but cactus, sand and rock.
His buddy is dead, along with two others.
Just last week the two of them
drank beers and half-drunk played volleyball in the sand.
The sweat pops out on his forehead to think
he might be next.
Night after night he waits and he wonders
who will die tonight?
He wants to go home now.
But his tour is young yet—he has 10 more months
to wait and wonder.
Three hundred nights
to become a single-digit statistic
in a war that’s supposed to be over
in a land where he was told he’d fight for freedom.
But nobody here, not even he, seems free to him.
At home in the hills his mother waits and wonders
if her fair-haired son will make it home
to eat the corn she shucks to freeze for winter,
the tomatoes and green beans she’s grown and canned.
She likes to think of him tanned and tow-headed
picking tobacco from the back of his daddy’s tractor.
Was that just last year?
She lays awake all night
keeping the watch with her only son, forgetful
that the time is not the same there;
she only knows the dark is dangerous.
She stares at the glowing green hands of the bedside clock
as they tick off one, two, three minutes—
she knows this is how many Americans die in Iraq daily.
Even she can count how many that will be in ten months
to a year. She knows the number one is all it takes to lose
and ruin more lives—hers, his father’s, his two sisters’,
his grandfather’s.
When she voted for Mr. Bush
she believed he could add and subtract.
She thought he could count
but she is bitter to realize he’s limited to dollars
not cents, and now her son’s life
ain’t worth a plug nickel up in Washington.
She, however, can subtract, has had to cut some losses,
but this is more than the sum of all of them
and she knows enough to be afraid.
She wants her son home to eat her cooking,
swim in the South Toe River
court the country girl who loves him
lie safe in his own bed dreaming
the dreams of peaceful sleepers—
not watching, waiting, wondering if the night
will demand his one and only life.

Mendy Knott July 2003

Mendy Knott [ [email protected]; arkansasscribbler.blogspot.com ]