We’re on a route uncharted, fire and blood erase our tracks. On we fly, on wings of thunder, never more to sheath our swords. All of us in battle fallen, not to be brought back by words.

Will there be a rendezvous? I know not. I only know we still must fight. We are sand grains in infinity, never to meet,never more see light.

Farewell then my son. Farewell then my conscience. My youth and my solace my one and my only.

And let this farewell be the end of a story, Of solitude vast and which none is more lonely. In which you remain,barred forever and ever, From light and from air,with your death pangs untold. Untold and unsoothed, not to be resurrected. Forever and ever, an 18 year old.

Farewell then, no trains ever come from those regions Unscheduled or scheduled, no aeroplanes fly there. Farewell then my son, for no miracles happen, As in this world dreams do not come true.

Farewell…

I will dream of you still as a baby, Treading the earth with little strong toes, The earth where already so many lie buried. This song to my son, is come to its close.

Son (Pavel Antokolsky, 1943)

The second is “Dulce et decorum est”, which we studied and analysed for “O” level. This poem, very much, is not a party-trick.

Later, I thought that the job of a soldier wasn’t to die for their country but to make someone else die for theirs. Perhaps that more cynical view was influenced by the poem and the other war poets that we covered.

I wonder if you can age a person based on them knowing this and whatever the Siegfried Sassoon poem that was covered in order to demonstrate onomatopoeia? I suppose it would depend how long it was (or indeed if it still is) part of the curriculum.

Another poem from Craiglockhart is Sassoon's "Repression of War Experience." It is one of the relatively uncommon works, both as literature and clinically, that depicts the sensory experience associated with PTSD. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57267/repression-of-w...

Incidentally, Rivers himself also wrote a paper titled "The Repression of War Experience." It was published in The Lancet around the same time. https://archive.is/EZerl

A century later, I believe the poet's attempt was more successful than the scientist's in sharing the data.

I like this version by The Men They Couldn't Hang best :

https://youtu.be/Kr6OzLJrS2k?si=ZX6lrXqjZktV20-V

Or, perhaps, Vera Lynn's "We'll meet again some sunny day".

These are good movies to rewatch, especially in these interesting times.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001df48 [2] https://open.spotify.com/episode/2nd5iWVnNCWL2ulAVsSDLe

CBRN defence imposes a substantial burden on modern militaries. Our infantry CBRN kit alone weighed 4.5kg, roughly the same weight as ten loaded 30-round STANAG magazines. That penalty applies to every soldier and similar burdens apply to vehicles, emplacements, heavy equipment. It increases fuel consumption, maintenance, logistics.

The training burden is also significant. In my experience nearly 8% of training time was dedicated to CBRN defence, more than marksmanship or signalling.

Operating under CBRN threat severely degrades ops tempo. Buttoning up slows movement, comms, situational awareness and command effectiveness. Speed and violence of action suffer and op tempo can drop by half or more. The impact on combat support and support units is worse than combat units. Naval and air forces fare worse again, with large decontamination requirements affecting sortie tempo, all external operations, and resupply. Even without casualties, the threat alone severely degrades manoeuvre warfare. They act as a force divisor.

The author reverses the logic. Modern militaries avoid chemical weapons for political reasons, not because they are ineffective. After WW1 they became politically toxic, and the Geneva Protocol has held because any state using them today would face immediate international condemnation and serious domestic political consequences.

https://theintercept.com/2025/12/05/boat-strike-survivors-do...

Killing is the biggest taboo and people need societal "absolution" afterwards.

The absence of this for Vietnam is what caused issues with veterans.

After Khamenei death Russian Foreign Ministry issued a statement that Russia is "against killing of the leaders of sovereign countries". Somehow they didn't mention nor regular citizens nor rank-and-file soldiers of sovereign countries.

In the Spanish series "El Cid" there is a nice depiction of how a battle and the whole war immediately ends once the king of one side is killed in that battle. Everybody just went back to their regular business.

A translation of saying in Russian, not sure whether it exists in English - "One's heroism is always a result of incompetency and idiotism of somebody else."

Why? It's a job. Chosen voluntarily (usually), with known risks. Never mind the propaganda part that they are dying for a "world we live in". How a soldier dying for some war with dubious morality is owed any "debt" is beyond me.

I submit that we owe others who died doing some kind of public good much more debt than some dude who was duped into sacrificing his life to gun down others for some made-up reason. It's really hard to find any soldier who died for a good cause for most of the past century actually.

  dul.cet.de.co:.rest.|pro:.pa.tri.a:.mo.ri:
  mor.set.fu.ga:.cem.|per.se.qui.tur.vi.rum
  nec.par.ci.tin.bel.li:s.iu.ven.tae
  po:pli.ti.bus.ti.mi.do:.que.ter.go

Reading it like in school (with qualitative stress marking the quantitative meter), that would be:

  dulcét decórest | pró patriá morí
  morsét fugácem | pérsequitúr virúm
  nec párcit ínbellís iuvéntae
  póplitibús timidóque térgo.

Most of the countries in WWI - which this poem is about - entered the war because of existing alliances, not because they were personally affected by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

While the US was indeed attacked by the Japanese in WWII, they could have focused entirely on the PTO and left their allies across the Atlantic to fend for themselves. Instead hundreds of thousands of Americans died liberating Europe.

The Vietnam War was at root the US supporting an allied government in Saigon. Tens of thousands of Americans died for an entirely different country than their own, one they'd likely never been to. A tragedy, but a tragedy that's been in the history books for fifty years now.

The Gulf War was 42 separate countries banding together to liberate Kuwait from an Iraqi invasion. How many of those soldiers had ever even thought about Kuwait before being deployed and potentially dying there?

When the US was attacked by Osama Bin Laden, the US invaded Afghanistan in response. Whether or not that was a justifiable decision, at the time dozens of countries lent their support. Their soldiers died for the sake of the US, though in this case maybe some of them had at least visited it.

This isn't an endorsement of dying for someone else's country (or even one's own); just an observation that it was normal even when this poem was written, hardly modern and no need for an "update" (perhaps just an expansion of the original). I also don't want this to come across as a defense of the US or Israeli action in Iran, which I assume is what you're referring to, so I'll be explicit about my position on this: the Iranian regime may be unquestionably awful, but not only is this attack illegal domestically (in the US) and internationally, I have extraordinarily little faith that either Netanyahu's Israel or Trump's US are going to handle this war or its aftermath well, and I'm terrified about the chaos that's likely to unfold over the coming months and years.

But: this sort of thing is precisely why Israelis/Zionists/Jews often view criticisms of Israel as anti-semitic. Things that have long been considered totally normal - military alliances, in this instance - are suddenly treated as novel and uniquely awful when Israel is involved. So their question becomes, "what's unique about Israel that makes people treat us differently", and then they look at their status as the only ethnically Jewish state and the history of how the world has treated Jews and derive themselves an answer. Especially when the complaint is rooted in an age old anti-semitic trope - “Jews secretly control the world” - just with “Jews” swapped out for “Israel”.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4BxP5IEyzw

(This is my all time favourite poem though)

We've reverted the title. But also re-upped the post, because about half of this thread is surprisingly good.

Doomguy feels seen. Especially since fanon has it that Doomguy is Catholic.