"Dulce Et Decorum Est" - Memorial Day 2007 [REPOST]

Wilfred Owen
"Dulce Et Decorum Est"

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.

GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!-- An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime.--
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

++++++++++++++++++++

From "AWOL in America," Harpers Magazine, March 2005:

Despite our entertainment industry telling us otherwise, it is not easy to kill. In his groundbreaking and highly influential study of World War II firing rates, S.L.A. Marshall ... interviewed soldiers fresh from battle and found that only 15 to 20 percent of the combat infantry were willing to fire their weapons ... even when their life or the lives of their comrades were threatened. When Medical Corps psychiatrists studied combat fatigue cases in the European Theater, they found that "fear of killing, rather than fear of being killed, was the most common cause of battle failure in the individual." ...

And the effect of his findings on the military has been profound. As Lietenant Colonel Dave Grossman notes in his book On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, "A firing rate of 15 to 20 percent among soldiers is like having a literacy rate of 15 to 20 percent among proofreaders. Once those in authority realized the existence and magnitude of the problem, it was only a matter of time until they solved it."

By the Korean War, the firing rate had gone up to 55 percent; in the Vietnam war, it was around 90 to 95 percent. How did the military achieve this? As Grossman writes, "Since World War II, a new era has quietly dawned in modern warfare: an era of psychological warfare ... conducted not upon the enemy, but upon one's own troops. ... The triad of mechanisms used to achieve this remarkable increase in killing are desensitization, conditioning, and denial defense mechanisms."

http://www.harpers.org/archive/2005/03/0080447

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[AsertyDances]

Glad for the re-post... and... I was just thinking about you today. I'm glad you are still out there.

[MetaBob]

Thanks. I watch all your videos and five star them. It embarrasses me that I don't comment... I don't know why I don't, or how to...

You breezed right past Santa Monica on you trip! We could have met. Oh well.

[xwidget]

Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori is a line from the Roman lyrical poet Horace's Odes (iii 2.13). The line can be rendered in English as: "It is sweet and fitting to die for one's country."

Thanks for this, including info in the sidebar.

[MetaBob]

Thanks for appreciating it.

[thespacemonkeyist]

I vividly remember this video when it first appeared 2 years ago

"He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud"

[MetaBob]

It's one of the perfect poems.

Thanks for continuing to watch. I hope to be posting new stuff again soon.

[MetaCraken]

The centuries will burn rich loads with which we groaned, whose warmth shall lull their dreaming lids, while songs are crooned; but they will not dream of us poor lads, left in the ground.

[Tothemattresses]

this poem is somewhere on a hot road in Flanders, in the endless landscape of that flat bit of the world. Its young men, wounded, headed to a medic station behind the lines when they're hit. I don't know why but ahts always hows its felt to me. Plastic and sweat and death. I sometimes think its no bad thing Owen didn't live to see the end of the war and the depression afterwards, how would he have written of the grandure of dying of starvation on the unemployment line not the front line?

[Ramiiam]

Great poem.

[JWoolford27]

Good vid Friend...im sorry for you losses...

[ultimategoobah]

metabob, i like you, why don't you make more videos?

[RationalEmotive]

fakesagan had nothing to do with the suspension of CapnCrunchBerries :) In fact he wanted Kevin to come back after 2 weeks. Youtube policy and anonymous flaggers cost CapnOAwesome's head.

[snapshotofharlech]

amazing video from metasnob

[Broatch6]

Owen is arguably THE BEST War Poet . certainly the MOST TRAGIC falling as he did only days before the War ended.

but I rather like Strange Meeting penned only days before he fell

Strange Meeting really resonates for me because my great grandfather had a Strange Meeting with a German Soldier in 1916. Strange Meeting suggests there may be an afterlife where everything is explained - everything FORGIVEN - but NOTHING captures the PITY that is WAR quite like DULCE ET DECORUM EST

[Broatch6]

like yur grandfather my great grandfather fought in the War To End All Wars...and survived...and he passed down stories...stories that were repeated to me when I was a kid ardent for some desperate glory...like the time he met a German soldier about his own age - 18 - in a trench in France and shot him ...just because his finger happened to be on the trigger...if it hadn't been there I wouldn't be here and you wouldn't be reading this

[Gimmeabreakman]

"an old guy moment" will remember that.