These Things That I Have Seen

How do I even begin to explain to you these things that I have seen-
A lifetime of events both bold and boring but mostly in between.
Of hundred mile marches through mountains with all the ups and downs;
Of driving through Bosnian villages and rubble that used to be towns;
Of all the images and comments on CNN and what that meant for me,
An early morning call, then load out and head across the sea.
First the hook the Jedi planned that caught my fanciful heart,
It surely wasn’t an ending- for me it was the start.
Next, images of starving kids then dead pilots not in the air,
Voices asking us to do something, then asking us why we were there.
Commissioned into the artillery immediately after a RIF,
The first few years of training passed in a blur- mundane and swift.
Well we thought that we were busy, marching through the Balkan mud.
But A few years later some buildings fell, then came real work and blood.
There are no words to explain to you how it feels when someone dies,
Painfully bleeding out while looking in your eyes.
After the fighting, life goes on as it will and always must,
With days of utter boredom and moments of adrenaline rush.
Training citizen-soldiers and sending them where I used to be,
Took some of the edge off, and opened my mind to policy.
The hardest thing I’ve had to see to this very day,
Is watching how fast Americans came undone when the levees gave way.
Despite our best efforts to break the log-jams free,
English to English translation was the bane of the interagency.
I spent time writing doctrine as the Army tried to redesign.
But everything new is old again in such a minimally short time.
I spent a year training 30th Brigade in Iraqi sand,
And another as a coalition planner in Afghanistan;
But in between, a seminal moment that helped me make it through,
After years of working to achieve my dream, I became a Jedi too.
I’ve taught the art of military operations, were all the field grades go,
And been dumbfounded by how little some “professionals” know.
I spent a year in Korea, lived in Seoul, saw the DMZ,
As a targeteer and planner, and a Colonel’s deputy.
Now I spend my time in planning- policy at an embassy,
But the internal strife in my nation is what truly worries me.
Now I know that I’m a romantic, longing for days gone by,
But it seems to me that in my childhood people would at least try,
To get along better, all of us rank and file,
Even the corrupted politicians, on both sides of the aisle.
When I think long and hard upon it, the thing that sticks to me,
As the most painful of all is our loss of civility.
We used to talk through difficult problems with passion, logic and tact,
Then, though disagreeing still, share food and drink; I’d like to get that back.