Some thoughts on my thirty-seventh birthday

A correction: I've been back in the United States ten days now. I was not in the close combat business, but I wrote plans that would ultimately have to be executed by those who were. One of the things I've never been able to completely reconcile is now I might have written better plans that might have made a difference for those who did not come back home.

Into sunlight they marched,
into dog day, into no saints day,
and were cut down.
They marched without knowing
how the air would be sucked from their lungs,
how their lungs would collapse,
how the world would twist itself, would
bend into the cruel angles.

Into the black understanding they marched
until the angels came
calling their names,
until they rose, one by one from the blood.
The light blasted down on them.
The bullets sliced through the razor grass
so there was not even time to speak.
The words would not let themselves be spoken.
Some of them died.
Some of them were not allowed to.

Bruce Weigl, "Elegy"