Delayed Reaction

I cried like everyone else
the day we received orders,
engraved in ranks, columns
of cold, precise language.
I fell on my knees to pray.
With eyes pinched shut,
I heard the time it took
for my tears to strike the page.

One year later, in Iraq,
I waited longer for the fall --
thirty seconds,
from the blinding, white flash
of our howitzer muzzle
'til the shell reached its target.

I still squint in that dazzling hell
of exploding Iraqi tanks,
their stark, angular silhouettes
scorched like shadows into sand.
Hundreds of enemy trucks, tanks, guns
erupted blue-hot,
blossomed red with fire,
sprouted tar-black mushrooms.

Another thirty seconds for the thuds.

Concussions rang off my ribs,
but I never heard the blasts.
I couldn't hear anything
for several minutes after we fired,
smoke pouring from the breach
as each spent casing spit hot upon the sand.
In our worst massacre,
we meted death with mechanized efficiency.
I lifted, spun, loaded
like some deaf, unthinking robot
on an assembly line.

I watched through binoculars,
noting the time from an Iraqi
cupping hands 'round his mouth
until we heard his plea.
We found hundreds of them,
Republican Guard Elite,
chained, shackled to broken-down tanks
like diseased animals left for dead,
their commanders long-gone.

Our C.O. had strict orders,
denying us time to take prisoners
in the lust for more wasteland.

One soldier still haunts my sleep,
one of five thousand
fathers, sons, brothers, husbands
our unit killed in thirty hours of war.
He was starved weak and thin,
but still he fought the chains,
like a dog choking itself on a leash,
straining with all its might
while a pack of wolves moves in.

Through blurred, dusty vision,
I waited through the worst few seconds
of the war,
of my life.

Silence followed his cry;
blood rushed through my ears;
heart thudded like a cannon.
Then our order --
one cold word
risen from a sea of static,
blown away on the desert wind.

Fire...

Scott Speck
01/24/2003