Headnote: I meant this piece to follow right after my Korean War post in March, called Christmas and Brine, but Brexit overtook me.
Hello Reader,
Got reservists?
Last week I sympathized with soldiers, so let’s keep to that theme. The young man I knew, in the background when I visited his parents, was a reservist, K.I.A.: I grieved hard for his folks.
To me, the special thing about reservists is no one is truly forcing them to be there; That, and how as volunteers they are “bright eyed and bushy tailed,” uncynical, not merely doing “a job.” To my knowledge, this is true for the UK, Canada and the Commonwealth ANZAC nations, but maybe not for the modern USA. Of the latter, I only know that I once spent a long desperate night with a US major (story for another time) who told me it took months to get his reservists up to a good standard. Then again, this was back in the 1970’s and his guys were not lily-white volunteers: By being reservists, they were exempt from going to Vietnam.
Is reserve training too hard? Put it this way: I once knew a long haired teenager, in a legion marching band, who complained about having to hold his instrument up to his chin before they marched off. I was trying to understand such people during a thoughtful conversation with my base chaplain, an older man with a buzz cut. First thought: Both my chaplain and I mused: “He was only there because the band was going to go to Germany.”
Second thought: The chaplain asked, “What instrument did he play?”
“The cymbals.”
The older soldier gave me a serious look and said, “There’s the answer: He wasn’t motivated. If he had been, then the discipline would not have seemed too hard.”
So now that’s my answer as to whether the reserves are too hard too hard: If you are motivated, and see the training as part of carrying out the mission, then it will feel appropriate.
… In the novel War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells, the casualty rate among the regular units who face the Martians is nearly 100 per cent. In my poems the situation is like the Jurassic Park movies: You survive by not encountering the dinosaurs.
On my blog, I am reprinting my poetry manuscript out of order. These next two poems are from when the Martians have passed on leaving the land depopulated, the economy in shambles. The narrator has two sisters, Janet and Susan.
Spotless Equipment
Make sure your equipment is spotless
said the middle aged dentist,
the stout factory foreman,
and the eager young postal clerk.
Make sure your equipment is spotless
said the colonel,
the sergeant-major,
and the corporal.
As civilians and reservists,
for the duration of these strange times,
their old jobs had swirled away like dead leaves.
In civilian jobs folks can be slack: Not now.
These leaders wanted clean equipment
for a sharp mind
in a sound body.
Their brothers in arms
had been burned up,
gassed down,
blasted to bits.
Their own survival was chance,
nothing more than chance.
Comrades once on the dole,
comrades once with grunt-jobs,
had a sharp role in this gasping world.
Now they lived with utter commitment.
Feed the wretched,
bridge the rivers,
clear the roads.
Keep your equipment spotless.
They remember their old life
like Tarzan remembers Lord Greystoke,
a life of gentleness and goals.
Now they live in the rough present,
surrounded by khaki,
half crude soldier and half Boy Scout.
And if
perchance
the Martians advance again,
run like hell
in an orderly fashion.
There’s no chance for slackers or heroes
When the Martians come.
At the Crossroads
At a crossroads stands the ruins
of a former general store and post office.
Here, the brush and bracken
are being cleared by “the Tommies.”
Mostly the soldiers are young.
Some are old,
and all were cheerful reservists, together.
Now they don’t have much of a life,
living here are at the crossroads.
Now their days are spent handing out warehouse food,
and digging latrines and drainage ditches in the rain.
In ponchos of grey they dig and dig,
complain and joke,
and dig their ditches straight and true.
When Janet and Susan smile,
the Tommies feel warmer and dryer.
Says the ginger haired one,
“I keep getting letters from a Las Vegas showgirl;
I told her to come here and meet you ladies.”
The royal mail had ended long ago.
Sean Crawford
Calgary
2019
Footnote: Ah, the “manpower-firepower ratio.”
If I was a time traveler, and came across a moustachioed serviceman, from the days of horses, arguing about whether modern weapons would ruin the spirit of war, I would tell him this ratio is eternal. An Australian history professor who’s name escapes me found the ratio is 20% no matter if the casualties come machine-swift or bayonet slow. At “20% casualty rate” defending troops will be broken in spirit; on open ground they will break and run… Homer, at the walls of Troy, described runners being mown down “like sheep before wolves.”
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