The Military Industrial
Complex
circa 1968
by Paul Hall.
In my days as an information specialist for the information office of the Army Material Command in a temporary building the size of a medium-sized city airport called T-7, a hangover from the Second World War, one of my duties was to deliver documents and other items from T7 to other defense installations throughout the Washington D.C. area. The main trip was about twenty minutes long from T7 to The Pentagon.
During the twenty minutes each day, I used the time to write poetry or play my harmonica quietly in the back of the bus. Now, a poet sometimes gains insight into a situation that defies words. Premonitions and the like. During the Vietnam Era in the late sixties, I had an extremely unsettling insight and very disturbing premonitions about the situation. Often I would discuss possible solutions with junior officers at the time considerate enough to talk with me, an enlisted man. It wasn't unfruitful. Many of them went on to be in command positions today.
The following is an example of my attempt to describe what I was perceiving using extreme poetic license and open verse. I imagined the chief problem to be an oblivious and overwhelming sense of haste, causing severe mistakes to culminate eventually in having to abandon the whole thing. But there where invisible factors at work, inevitable in any situation of the ongoing futility of man: manipulation behind the scenes, destabilizations, inordinate business opportunity that sought to perpetually maintain itself, the opponent skill of using public opinion, and, oh yes, the empire of the permanent congressional staffers. Many things all working at once. And more bedsides, which I won't go into except I called it the "Nimrod Factor".
Scrambled legs over easy
and tired muscles around saucered eyes.
A comical dance done by the funniest,
the serious.
I'm there.
You're there.
We're there.
Only those who are able to count out are forgotten.
Left to the clouds
where the silence can be seen in the trees.
And the mad, mad, maddening, hastening rush
of pile and stack
of shuffle and rumble
of "Build, you bastards! Build and dash."
And of the cry of "Oh my God! Oh my God!"
to the missed bus before the worsening storm
comes a time when "rush"
kills it's victims
in the newest of strangest ways.
And this very now
which passes into dirty silt beyond the fertile deltas of time
is headed to.
And that's all we can say.
"Headed to..."
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Paul A. L. Hall
Copyright © 2003 [Paul Hall]. All rights reserved.
email: poetry@paulhallart.com