This work is an invocation, a modern lament built on the rhythmic foundation of the American catalogue poem. It is a necessary scream of witness, dedicated to the post-9/11 veteran suffering far from the promised centers of care. The language is raw because the subject is raw; the form is relentless because the suffering is relentless. Prepare for the litany of what is carried home from the wars and what is denied in the cold silence of the homeland.
The Howling
I saw the greatest minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the late Michigan snow looking for a functional VA clinic, or just a quiet place to discharge the memory of fire, and my hate is a direct inverse to how much I valued what was murdered out of me, left bleeding in the frozen soil of the Upper Peninsula, a thousand miles from the nearest crisis bed that was only guarded by the gates of bureaucratic paperwork, a vast flat land of pines and empty roads where the silence is loud enough to hear the bullet chambering,
I saw the greatest minds of my generation who read a research paper in college where the thesis argued that the military service recreates in the brain structures so similar to THE FAMILY that military sexual trauma presents similar symptoms to those who experienced incest, and who knew the uniform was the family, the betrayal built into the blueprint, the trauma an unavoidable heirloom handed down by the nation,
Military = Family, incestuous and inescapable, the trauma a dirty secret protected by command loyalty, just like in the Godfather but with classier dinnerware, and who, talking to enough crayon eating females, learned they all joined because they thought they would look hot as fuck in them dress blues, wanting to trade one toxic father for a bigger, national one, a uniform that promised protection but delivered violation... Vin Diesel doesn’t know shit about Family, he's never felt the steel trap of PTSD closing in the absolute quiet of a Grand Rapids night, where the pines whisper the names of the dead,
I saw the greatest minds of my generation who remembered the somber look in one Vietnam veteran's face, a face you could tell by the moustache knew who would win in a cage fight, Lenin or Lennon, and who wearily, yet with nostalgic awe, described his political activity after his DD214, this hippie’s 1000-mile stare stretching from Washington DC on January 6th 2021 to Chicago, August 1986, but it finally settled on the empty bottle of cheap bourbon in his hand outside the VFW in Detroit, staring into the abyss of his own obsolescence,
“I don’t know what happened. We were all feminist and radicals after Vietnam. We picked fights. Now all these crusty motherfuckers are Gran Torino’s,” waiting for the next war to justify their suffering, trapped in their double-wides with a shotgun and a flag, hating the world they fought to protect, and who thought it fair to say that many of us post-9/11 veterans are the age of Rambo's children or grandchild, and who knew You fuckers won’t hear our ideas, won't listen to our leadership, and we don’t like drinking into oblivion in poorly lit— creepy-ass bars on M-55—listening to my great great great grand father joke about raping women while on summer vacation in NAM, like it was a fucking video game achievement unlocked with human suffering, a badge of honor he wore next to his Purple Heart, demanding we respect the violence that destroyed him,
I saw the greatest minds of my generation who carried our own horrors, and who dared to exchange photo albums—My Lai for Abu Ghraib—having ever found a video on YouTube of Gran Torino tossing a puppy off a cliff in Cambodia, knowing we both took photos, poked the dead with sticks and brought home human remains as trophies, That’s the shit serial killers do, take trophies, and who knew it's estimated 20% of serial killers are veterans? Suicide is not the only Thing We Carry home, the trophies are still in the attic, wrapped in old flags, waiting to be rediscovered by our children, and knowing 2 girls 1 Cup will always Spit on That Grave, demanding a greater scandal than mere death, Mother fucker please,
I saw the greatest minds of my generation woke at night, Confusing the puddle of shivers and sweat they woke in to images of what was left of a best friend who stepped on the wrong landmine, hearing him scream “He paid for my first lap dance in Spain, and I met his mother and sister!” Among the things we carry is death, regret and the weird, desperate relief that my dead friend will never find out I fucked his mother and sister, trading one unspeakable intimacy for another in the vacuum he left behind, a secret festering beneath the Michigan soil,
Among the things we carry is an existential weight so heavy we cut something out ourselves and let it disappear to keep suicide off the brain, the act of self-mutilation a desperate prayer for psychic quiet in a landscape with no doctors, the constant math problem of living where the only logical solution is the terminal one, miles from the nearest emergency room willing to take V.A. insurance,
I saw the greatest minds of my generation triggered by their own child’s cries, screaming and asking How can I comfort my child if they remind me of nights spent in holes dug by standard issue shovels? We were always relieved to hear babies cry or stop crying. It meant the bombs and IED’s didn’t hit one of us, the silence of a Michigan woods too loud, too heavy with the memory of distant, catastrophic silence,
I saw the greatest minds of my generation talking to dead friends under nerve-ripped eyes of a social worker too old or too young to understand violence, staring into the flickering light of a laptop screen where the telehealth appointment keeps cutting out because the satellite signal is too weak in Bad Axe, and my battle buddy was telling a joke when the bullet turned his brains into a Rorschach, and what was left of him looked like a turtle cheeseburger, Oh, shit this is no social work. She’s a stripper with money on her mind, and I’m a dumb ass with roses in my hand, chasing a hollow connection in a cheap club ten miles from my broken trailer, hoping the illusion of connection will last until morning, and listening as some crayon eater from the bar knows what up and starts belting out a song by the great philosophy T-Pain:
It was love at first sight when I seen that ass shakin' / And bout fifty dollars later, it was love in our makin' / Ya simply won my heart when I saw the way ya work that pole / And when you bent over, ya had my wallet in a chokehold / I saw you in your birthday suit and1 baby it was fate / When you give me a lap dance, it's like we gone on a date / But I feel like ya cheatin' on me when I see ya dancin' with other guys / I'm runnin' low on ones, I can't lie I'm in love baby / I'm in love with a stripper, she really think I'm playing, I'm playing / She take me for a joke when I say it / I'm in love with a stripper, gotta get her, I, gotta get with her / I can't stay out this club, because the club is the only place
the roar of the speakers and the smell of stale beer drowns out the incessant, high-pitched ringing in my ears, the sound of the pressure plate engaging,
I saw the greatest minds of my generation talking to sandwiches that didn’t exist and ones that did, and who knew both the club and the BLT were more empathic than the nurse jabbing me on the hour, every goddamn hour, or the fucking intern in the VA Hospital ER at 2am in Battle Creek, who thinks my decade of war can be solved with a pamphlet and a referral to a therapist four counties away, telling me to "just breathe," NURSE: “Could you please stop much.” Veteran: “FUCKYOUVERYMUCHGOGETYOURGODDAMNSUPERVISOR!” Mother fucker please, please give me the dignity of unmanaged rage before the calm of the service weapon finally takes me, and who struggled in the greatest mind of my generational struggle over the use of the word CUNT, asking Will it hurt this fucking nurse’s soul enough or do I have to get creative, finding the exact arrangement of syllables that conveys the depth of the betrayal, the abandonment, the structural failure of the entire apparatus?
I saw the greatest minds of my generation disappointed by the social worker's response to their question, delivered via a shaky Wi-Fi signal across 80 miles of frozen farmland, after waiting seven weeks for the appointment. Veteran: “Why do veterans kill themselves even if they go to therapy?” Social Worker: “Because they don’t try hard enough in therapy. Now, about rescheduling your next appointment in four months, unless you want to drive all the way to Ann Arbor.”
CUNT CUNT CUNT CUNT CUNT, echoing in the metal silence of the suicide machine parked in the gravel lot outside the Detroit VA, the only consistent service provided by the state,
I saw the greatest minds of my generation swallowing their service weapon in VA Hospital Parking Garages to make a point, the final, undeniable note in the grand American symphony of neglect, the quiet, efficient end to a life of disposable service,
who heard the Vietnam veterans remind everyone, even themselves that they were spit on and called baby killers, shouting Ya’ll only tortured the locals for LULZ, but my generation perfected torture, politicized it, and made a profit selling tickets to the hanging, Zero Dark Thirty, the ticket price was my sanity, and who knew the truth of the matter is that not all veterans eat babies, but know the taste of human veal, and the taste is bitter, metallic, and never leaves the back of your throat, even after a 40oz and cheap vodka,
I saw the greatest minds of my generations chopped into pieces and hid in the woods. This one’s on you Fort Hood. You are responsible for every part. We are officially government property, and the government only cares about the inventory sheet, not the final resting place in the swamp behind the deer blind where the dogs will find the remains,
Somewhere, in the distance a crusty veteran says. “Hold my beer. Let me tell you kids about WW2!”
U.S. Army General Courts-Martial for Rape, World War 2 (Brownmiller, 1975) | |
Period | Convictions |
Jan-June, 1942 | 1 |
July-Dec, 1942 | 10 |
Jan-June, 1943 | 25 |
July-Dec, 1943 | 43 |
Jan-June, 1944 (Pre D-Day) | 52 |
July-Dec, 1944 | 82 |
Jan-June, 1945 | 60 |
July-Dec, 1945 | 247 |
Jan-June, 1946 | 355 |
July-Dec, 1946 | 50 |
Jan-June, 1947 | 46 |
TOTAL CONVICTIONS | 971 |
Soldiers executed for Rape | 55 |
Additional executed for Rape and Murder | 18 |
I saw the greatest minds of my generation celebrating Valentine’s Day alone, staring at the muted glow of a phone screen in some desolate Upper Peninsula cabin or a sterile Grand Rapids apartment, finding themselves instantly judged and discarded by the last three matches on Tinder who, upon finding out he was a veteran, ghosted instantly or offered a chilling, clinical confession, saying: "You remind me of the man who raped, beat, abused, or robbed me," who knew this was the cold reality of the invisible scarlet letter stitched onto the chest of every veteran's fleece jacket, who understood that we carry the entire history of military violence in our dating profile, judged not by individual action but as the embodiment of structural violence, a walking, breathing monstrosity to the civilian female population of Michigan, who looked at the uniform and saw the shadow of Fort Hood, who tallied the statistics of historical military sexual assault, who feared the sheer, raw power of sanctioned violence, and this judgment became the sharpest sting of all, leading to the chilling, constant self-interrogation in the vast, empty quiet of the mental health desert: If I am automatically classified as a dangerous monster, a walking risk to any potential partner, will I die alone?—this final, agonizing wound of service, who found it not in the shrapnel, but in the calculated exclusion from simple human connection, leaving the veteran isolated in the state they swore to protect, forever waiting for a love that believes him capable of safety, not just destruction.
The things we carry, we carry home with us, and home is a cold, empty cabin waiting for the worst to happen, waiting for the snow to bury the driveway and the signal to die, Goddamn it, when our own therapists break into tears at a mere synopsis of the horrors we carry, how the hell are we supposed to trust empathetically fragile social workers? How are we ever supposed to heal when the thoughts, images, and sounds that haunt our nights also haunt yours, and you live four counties away from the nearest clinician who takes Tricare and has the courage to look into the void we bring home, leaving us here in the dead Michigan winter with no one but the static on the broken radio and the ghost of the last man standing.
The Testament of Silence
The final, sustained note of this poem is not an end, but an echoing judgment. The sheer, overwhelming distance—geographic and psychological—between the veterans suffering in the heartland and the bureaucratic machines of supposed care is the true scandal. The poem functions as a testimonial against neglect, cataloging both the personal hell of the trauma and the institutional failure that compounds it. The statistics (Brownmiller, 1975) stand not as dry data, but as cold, irrefutable proof that the military's violent inheritance is passed down generation to generation, creating new victims from the old. This rage, this sustained, unmanaged cry, remains the most honest response to a nation that demands sacrifice and then offers only paperwork in return.
References
Brownmiller, Susan. (1975). Against our Will: Men, Woman and Rape. Simon & Schuster.
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