Can it really be twenty years since I said farewell to arms? The calendar, alas, does not lie. Twenty long years, blowing in the cold, heartless, not-understanding winds of civvy street…

I guess I still have a lot of mental and spiritual baggage from my army service during Desert Storm. The Flint Driscoll who emerged from the VA hospital, still bruised by the accidental beating he received in a darkened store-room, was not the same naive and idealistic young reserve lieutentant who had landed in Ramstein Air Base only two months before. War made a man of me, but in ways that have scarred me until this very day. I still find it very difficult to talk about those times, apart those four novels I wrote, and the articles for The National Interest, and the biopic feature pitch that is currently still in Hallmark’s court.

If you weren’t there, you wouldn’t understand.

Now, though, after twenty long years, surely the time has come to purge myself of the psychic pain, and I fear that mere prose will not suffice. Only verse – blank or heroic – will bear the dreadful burden of my suffering, the profundity of my insights, the zen-like comprehension of the ying and yang of cruelty and kindness, life and death, loneliness and brotherhood, war and peace. I envisage a major and troubling retro-modernist verse cycle, analogous to Eliot’s The Waste Land, but without all the faggoty footnotes he added to explain the meaning. You wimped out, Eliot. Have the courage of your convictions. Besides, the kind of people who read poetry are happy when they don’t really get it.

It could take me a week, perhaps two, to knock-up an  Eliot/Pound-type epic, so in the meantime I’ll leave you with this. Okay, I didn’t write it myself, but I still can’t read it without crying.

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