Well, I have to say that, years later, the US pilot will probably not be feeling so exhilarated. I am thinking of a Colonel in the Marines who volunteered for three tours of duty, as a helicopter pilot in the Vietnam war. He remained in the military until his retirement and was usually pro-military and conservative in his views. But later on, in his fifties, sitting at home at night drinking, for he was and is usually drunk, he began to open up to his adult children about his true feelings, the torment and the losses, not only to 'his' young men who were obliterated, but to the 'enemy', the agony of what he had done. It's perhaps too bad that it's not the old men who are drafted. I remember once going through the airport in Charlottesville, not far from Ft. Bragg, at the holidays, and it was packed with soldiers, and I was shocked for they _did_ seem to be boys, some of them looked 14 or 15.
And, yes, Denise Levertov was a continuing and ardent presence for peace from Vietnam on. Her views and long friendship with Sam Hamill, she was on the board of Copper Canyon Press for many years, are part of the strength behind his own stance and the inception of poetsagainstthewar. Not to say that she talked him into it. Hamill was the only person in the Marine Corps to declare as a conscientious objector while in the corps, at least up to that date, and who knows? possibly since.
Best,
Rebecca
Rebecca Seiferle
www.thedrunkenboat.com
-------Original Message-------
From: "Árni Ibsen" <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: 03/29/03 02:58 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: US pilot describes bombing Baghdad as "exhilarating"
>
> on 3/29/03 9:36 PM, Gabriel Gudding at [log in to unmask] wrote:
> "It was exhilarating," Commander Jeff Penfield said after landing his
> F/A-18E Super Hornet back on the Abraham Lincoln, which is supporting
the
> U.S.-led invasion force from the Gulf.
> "It was all nice and calm in the city," he said. "Once those bombs hit
all
> hell broke loose. I bet we saw 15 SAMs (surface-to-air missiles), about
> three or four up our way so we had to defend a couple of times.
> "What I felt more than anything was exhilaration."
Harks back to the Gulf in 1991, when all you saw of the war was as if
through a kind of green light night-vision binoculars which looked so like
the screen of a computer game plus interviews after the raids with bomber
pilots too high on adrenalin after 'unwittinglly' dropping all those tons
of
explosives and knowing they had been allowed to kill dozens of frightened
people through someone elses orders.
Btw. it was so curious to make my first ever visit to the States back in
1990 when the ghost of 1960s resistance was being aroused again. The
images
of the Vietnam War Memorial, with it's postcard just received from a
soldier
stationed in the Gulf plus talking to dedicated war opponent Denise
Levertov
in Seattle that time.
My best to poets in these times ...
Árni
--
Árni Ibsen
Stekkjarkinn 19,
220 Hafnarfjördur,
Iceland
tel.: +354-555-3991
e-mail: [log in to unmask]
<a target=_blank
href="http://www.centrum.is/~aibsen/">http://www.centrum.is/~aibsen/</a>
>
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