Siegfried’s glimpse into the minds of our veterans is an intense one. These courageous men and women go to war and come home from war, and on the surface, we may not notice how much of their demeanor has changed. This poem makes me wonder: do we know how different our troops are returning?

I’ve done more than my share of standing and clapping as our troops pass us by in parades, almost as if they are some spectacle; this concept we’ve accepted, but never really took the time to validate. To me, clapping for our troops as they pass by is similar to the person putting his or her hand on my shoulder at a funeral and telling me everything’s going to be all right. You wouldn’t know, would you? You come to me, and you say what you feel like you need to say to make things better. Well, I’m sure those soldiers probably have similar ideas of our ethically-enforced applause.

“Sneak home and pray you’ll never know the hell where youth and laughter go”– the most crucial point in the poem for me. It is a cultivation of the emotion within the poem. In the first paragraph, we are being introduced to an innocent, eager soldier who was proud to serve. By the second paragraph, we can see this joy, demonstrated on the outside, is not quite as described. It was all fun and games until he took his own life. Rounding into the third and final paragraph, we understand just how plagued the minds of the soldiers are. They’re imprisoned in an internal hell. One we’ll never know until we too are in the trenches.

I’ve held a fascination for this poem since my senior year of high school. It was so real to me– the pain kept hidden inside, the phony mustache that would only hope to disguise what really lies underneath, and the innocence this poem aims to rob you of– the ignorance- as we all flutter freely through life, stopping only briefly to thank our troops for “serving”- never understanding how heavy this service is, and what innocence and happiness were robbed from them. Let’s at least think of this the next time we wake up warm in our beds, in our secured homes, to eat a home-cooked meal and have the audacity to smile and clap in the faces of men, returning home from a night in the trenches, having eaten chicken in bags 24 hours prior.

ooh-rah.

Photo courtesy of flickr.com