The Beauty of War

Poetic Analysis - The Beauty of War 

Curt Bennett

After having heard many a time about poetry of the first World War,  began to wonder if poetry was available from other 20th century wars. 
It seems to be the case, that when intellectual young men are drafted against their will, to fight in a foreign war, they often turn to an art form to express their frustration and anger, at the violation of their free will. The 20th century war in which the draft was arguably most controversial is definitely that which swept across South East Asia from the early 1960s, to the mid '70s. The Vietnam War came about at a time of great cultural change in the US, and I was curious to see what impact, if any, those dynamics had on the War poetry of that era.  The following is a poem by a Us fighter pilot, written while he was stationed in Vietnam - 

 
 THE BEAUTY OF WAR

War at night
Has a special beauty,
There is nothing anywhere,
That can quite compare.

Perimeter flares slice/arc the black,
Then bob and slowly weave to earth
Causing shadows to dance and weave
And stretch your world's reality.

Spectacular firefights
As streaming red fifties tattoo,
Clashing with sporadic VC green,
Harmonizes with 81mm quick-flashes.

Distant artillery white blinks
Splits the nearby tree line shadows,
As it cracking thunder
Streaks screaming through the sky.

High on his sky-throne
Spooky pisses his tracers in a gentle flow,
Moaned from multi barreled Gattling guns
That disappear and melt into the blackness below.

Nape at night is out of sight!
It splashes in yellowish, red syrupy splash,
That laboriously floats up, out then down
Smothering the earth and licking it clean.

Bombs are quick and ruthless,
Fast silver-white flashes in the black,
But cutting iron, not flash, kills,
And their mission is grim.

Rockets flash like zipping gangbusters,
Streaking a fiery sparkling tail
That skims into the black void to disappear,
Then resurrect again in detonation.

The sounds of war are different from others,
Not too unpleasant, but distinct,
The eternal crackle and chatter of radios,
 Filling the air like white, background noise.

The sights and sounds of war at night,
Are unseen and impersonal,
Without authorship or responsibility,
Somehow removed, to be viewed from afar.

One unpleasant reality of war
Is the smell, the cordite burn,
The acrid sweet smell of sweet pork,
From burning, human meat.

Somehow that and the screams
Of the unseen dying somewhere
Out there, tends to diminish
The beauty and fun of it all.

Many soldiers, including those that I know personally, describe the war of night as being beautiful. 

At least, that's the case when you're looking at it from a mountain, or a cockpit, in this case. The poet describes it all in vivid detail from the sights, to the sounds. The first part of the poem is almost an ode to war, using heavy simile and personification to being to life the Vietnamese landscape as it is chewed up by a war.

One of my favorite parts of this stanza, is the verse in which Bennett describes the Spooky, high on his throne, spraying down white fire in the form of thousands of bullets. A Spooky is not an airborne ghost in the literal sense, but rather an old American transport plane from World War 2, stripped of seats, and fitted with several miniguns facing out the left side. The gunship slowly circles a target, such as a hill,or building, and sprays (or as the author says, pisses) thousands of bullets down onto it. These aircraft were a novel invention at that time, and were viewed with awe, and fear, on both sides.  One of the major themes present in the poem is that of the dehumanizing aspect of fighting at night, especially from the air. At night, a pilot can barely see anything, he relies on electronics and such to tell him where to go, and where to shoot. He fires guns, and drops bombs, but never sees where they go, or what they hit, whereas during the day, the pilot can see the house or such that he is going to destroy, and may catch a glimpse of the target. To kill another human being is a heavy thing, and yet, when done at night, with a plane, or an artillery strike, much of the weight carried by the perpetrator seems to fall away. With regards to the more conventional aspects of the poem - it employs simile and personification to enhance and dramatize/poeticize the events depicted, the poem doesn't really rhyme, but I feel that its other aspects make it a traditional, yet avante-guard war poem.