[Peace-discuss] Support our troops?

[C. G. Estabrook]

[While we prepare for an I-support-the-troops celebration from all sides 
tonight, we should remember what those troops were sent to do (and did). 
  On the rule that the poets usually get there first, here's an example 
from the current New Yorker.  The blog American Leftist, which posts it, 
says it's "about one of the two totally innocent guys who were beaten to 
death by US forces at the Bagram Collection Point" in Afghanistan, and 
that "the New York Times published a graphic account of the deaths of 
Dilawar and Habibullah, a commendable piece of journalism which should 
be read by all those who view Afghanistan as a good war."  --CGE]


     Bagram, Afghanistan, 2002

     The interrogation celebrated spikes and cuffs,
     the inky blue that invades a blackened eye,
     the eyeball that bulges like a radish,
     that incarnadine only blood can create.
     They asked the young taxi driver questions
     he could not answer, and they beat his legs
     until he could no longer kneel on their command.
     They chained him by the wrists to the ceiling.
     They may have admired the human form then,
     stretched out, for the soldiers were also athletes
     trained to shout in unison and be buddies.
     By the time his legs had stiffened, a blood clot
     was already tracing a vein into his heart.
     They said he was dead when they cut him down,
     but he was dead the day they arrested him.
     Are they feeding the prisoners gravel now?
     To make them skillful orators as they confess?
     Here stands Demosthenes in the military court,
     unable to form the words "my country". What
     shall we do, we who are at war but are asked
     to pretend we are not? Do we need another
     naïve apologist to crown us with clichés
     that would turn the grass brown above a grave?
     They called the carcass Mr. Dilawar. They
     believed he was innocent. Their orders were
     to step on the necks of the prisoners, to
     break their will, to make them say something
     in a sleep-deprived delirium of fractures,
     rising to the occasion, or, like Mr. Dilawar,
     leaving his few possessions and his body.

     - Marvin Bell, The New Yorker, 8 Jan. 2007