Bill Moyers
speaking at the United States Military Academy on November 15, 2006:
Many of you will be heading for Iraq. I have never been a soldier
myself, never been tested under fire, never faced hard choices between
duty and feeling, or duty and conscience, under deadly circumstances. I
will never know if I have the courage to be shot at, or to shoot back,
or the discipline to do my duty knowing the people who dispatched me to
kill—or be killed—had no idea of the moral abyss into which they were
plunging me. … Over the year I turned to the poets for help in
understanding the realities of war; it is from the poets we outsiders
most often learn what you soldiers experience. I admired your former
superintendent, General William Lennox, who held a doctorate in
literature and taught poetry classes here because, he said, “poetry is
a great vehicle to teach cadets as much as anyone can what combat is
like.” So it is. From the opening lines of the Iliad: Rage,
Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ Son AchillesÖhurling down to the
House of Death so many souls, great fighters’ souls, but made their
bodies carrion for the dogs and birdsÖ. to Wilfred Owen’s pained cry from the trenches of France: I am the enemy you killed, my friendÖ to W. D. Ehrhart’s staccato recitation of the
Barely tolerable conglomeration of mud, heat, sweat, dirt, rain, pain,
fearÖwe march grinding under the weight of heavy packs, feet dialed to
the groundÖwe wonderÖ Poets with their empathy and evocation
open to bystanders what lies buried in the soldier’s soul. Those of you
soon to be leading others in combat may wish to take a metaphorical
detour to the Hindenburg Line of World War I, where the officer and
poet Wilfred Owen, a man of extraordinary courage who was killed a week
before the Armistice, wrote: “I came out in order to help these
boys—directly by leading them as well as an officer can; indirectly, by
watching their sufferings that I may speak of them as well as a pleader
can.” People in power should be required to take classes in the poetry
of war. As a presidential assistant during the early escalation of the
war in Vietnam, I remember how the President blanched when the Chairman
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said it would take one million fighting
men and 10 years really to win in Vietnam, but even then the talk of
war was about policy, strategy, numbers and budgets, not severed limbs
and eviscerated bodies. That experience, and the experience 40 years
later of watching another White House go to war, also relying on
inadequate intelligence, exaggerated claims and premature judgments,
keeping Congress in the dark while wooing a gullible press, cheered on
by partisans, pundits, and editorial writers safely divorced from
realities on the ground, ended any tolerance I might have had for those
who advocate war from the loftiness of the pulpit, the safety of a
laptop, the comfort of a think tank, or the glamour of a television
studio. Watching one day on C-Span as one member of Congress after
another took to the floor to praise our troops in Iraq, I was reminded
that I could only name three members of Congress who have a son or
daughter in the military. How often we hear the most vigorous argument
for war from those who count on others of valor to fight it. As General
William Tecumseh Sherman said after the Civil War: “It is only those
who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the
wounded who cry aloud for blood, more vengeance, more desolation.” (12/04/06)
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