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    Service: Poems
    Service: Poems
    Service: Poems
    Ebook77 pages32 minutes

    Service: Poems

    By Bruce Lack and Robert A. Fink

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    About this ebook

    What Bruce Lack offers in the poems in Service is truth—complex, ambiguous, paradoxical, contradictory, impossible—about the experiences of a Marine fighting the Iraq War and the jarring transition that comes with returning home to find the war reduced to background noise for a remote civilian population. Bruce Lack’s forceful, authentic poetry confronts the human cost of sending young men and women to fight a war of questionable justification against an insurgency unbound by rules of engagement. Lack’s poems engage honestly with the frustration of fighting an elusive, ruthless enemy, the guilt of surviving when others do not, and the residual anger that may never leave the generation of veterans of the War on Terror. Written in the voice of the Marine but directed toward and accessible to the civilian, Service is a book that seeks to close the communication gap between the two.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTexas Tech University Press
    Release dateApr 14, 2020
    ISBN9780896729216
    Service: Poems
    Author

    Bruce Lack

    Bruce Lack served honorably in the United States Marine Corps from 2003–2007, spending twenty-one months in Fallujah, Iraq. He is a recent graduate of the Helen Zell Writer’s Program at the University of Michigan. He lives in Portage, Michigan, with his wife and son.

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      Book preview

      Service - Bruce Lack

      Contents

      Introduction

      The Walt McDonald First-Book Series in Poetry

      I

      FNG

      How Not To Write A War Poem

      The War According to Master Sergeant Marsh

      How We Are Sick

      When Reid Died

      Long as I’m Wishing

      The Walt McDonald First-Book Series in Poetry

      Lessons for the Assholes from Blackwater: All These Things Can

      Kill You

      The Last Five Minutes

      Plea to Heaven

      Rules of Engagement Pop-Quiz

      Thirteen Months of Talking to God

      No Applicable Regulations

      Last Day in Fallujah

      II

      Our War

      III

      David Gomez: El Paso, Texas

      Get Some

      Hadji

      The Walt McDonald First-Book Series in Poetry

      In Heaven There Are No Doors

      Self-Portrait in Public

      Small Talk

      First Supper Back

      The Walt McDonald First-Book Series in Poetry

      Suicide Days

      Without Regard

      Scanning

      Mission Statement

      Introduction

      I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

      T. S. Eliot—The Waste Land

      "Bring me to the brink of mountains, mystic

      Dread, rapture of fear I feel and . . . fail.

      Still: the swallow slicing blue is beautiful.

      Still: the cloud-tugged bell tower’s frozen music."

      Christian Wiman—Translation of the opening stanza from

      Osip Mandelstam’s Bring Me To The Brink.

      Reading Bruce Lack’s Service, we discover ourselves engaged, learning, and remembering the rules of engagement (Rules of Engagement Pop-Quiz). Before we know it, we are no longer the new guy (FNG), the one who, deployed, counts the days; who, keeping a calendar, drives himself crazy; the one who doesn’t know any better (The War According To Master Sergeant Marsh). We are here for the duration (The War According to Master Sergeant Marsh). We will talk to God. We will beg Jesus to look away (Thirteen Months of Talking to God), but we will not be able to.

      Service was written for us, written to us. This is our Let Me Tell You . . . book. The title of Miller Williams’ poem Let Me Tell You also functions as the poem’s opening line, followed by how to do it from the beginning. / First notice everything. Williams is instructing students in the art of writing poems. Bruce Lack, his Drill Instructor, Master Sergeant Marsh, and numerous other voices of combat veteran Marines instruct us in the craft of staying alive, specifically in Fallujah, Iraq. First notice everything: scan the road, the roadside, for anything that looks innocent—that jumble of children’s toys, the Coke can, a mangled soccer ball, / folding chair, battered road sign, window frame (Scanning). That body is a bomb. They put a bomb in a corpse (That Feeling You Can Only Describe in Arabic). Innocence will kill you.

      Not me, you’re thinking, and I agree. You and I are not reading Service as a survival manual. We’re too young, too old,

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