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]
http://www.centrum.is/~aibsen/
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