Comments on: Poetry again: I Run Away Quickly

By: soldat de métier

soldat de métier — Sat, 04 Jul 2015 02:23:25 +0000

Buffalo, un véhicule super blindé de déminage

Avec ses presque 4 mètres de hauteur, Buffalo est certainement le véhicule blindé le plus curieux en dotation dans l’armée française. Son rôle, déminer le terrain avant le passage des autres unités de l’armée de Terre… La silhouette originale de ce véh…

By: chrishernandezauthor

chrishernandezauthor — Wed, 11 Dec 2013 02:17:58 +0000

In reply to cleptoUSMC.

Clepto,

Sorry for the delayed response. Yeah, convoys sucked. I remember tensing up every time we passed a parked car, or pile of trash. A few times we had IEDs detonate near us, the closest being about 25 meters from my Humvee while we were sitting still one night. The sense of helplessness just SUCKED. One of my friends who served with me in Iraq went to Afghanistan as an embedded trainer afterward, and he told me, “Afghanistan was therapy for Iraq.” That was a hell of a way to put it, and I absolutely agree.

Thanks for your service, Semper Fi and welcome home.

By: chrishernandezauthor

chrishernandezauthor — Wed, 11 Dec 2013 02:14:49 +0000

In reply to CouchBear. Bear, Thanks for the compliment, and please feel free to brutally criticize anything I write. Honest critique is worth its weight in gold.

By: chrishernandezauthor

chrishernandezauthor — Wed, 11 Dec 2013 02:13:48 +0000

In reply to Les.

Les,

My grandfather trained as a landing craft driver, but wound up as a machine gunner on blimps and PBYs escorting convoys from Florida to New Jersey. He was never in combat, but I bet there were tense moments.

Our convoys were boring as hell. Until something exploded and freaked us the f**k out.

By: chrishernandezauthor

chrishernandezauthor — Wed, 11 Dec 2013 02:11:30 +0000

In reply to SPEMack.

Mack,

Sorry for the long delay in responding. I’ve read the Ball Turret Gunner, and was kind of turned off by it. Then again, I’m from the all-volunteer generation, so the “I was born into the state” reference doesn’t sit well with me. But it is a powerful poem.

The only times I ever fired a weapon at someone, I was firing a .50. Hell of a weapon, and that act alone connects me to soldiers all the way back before WW2.

By: cleptoUSMC

cleptoUSMC — Wed, 27 Nov 2013 18:58:55 +0000

Damn wind in my eyes. Dude….Brother…….. Damn.
I had to do convoy escort for a short while on my second deployment. Didn’t have to do it on my other three. Thank God for that. Sitting in a tin can, puckered and waiting for the inevitable, straight sucks. Great poem.

By: CouchBear

CouchBear — Sun, 24 Nov 2013 18:14:51 +0000

Chris, I followed a link to your blog from a friend’s Facebook page, and I have to say I like what I see here. You write well, and that is truly a breath of fresh air in this age of 160-character conversations consisting mostly of pop culture acronyms! You’re very articulate and you express yourself well, whether in your poetry or in your other work. Things like this might help people who have never had their finger on a trigger to gain a little better understanding of what goes on inside of those of us who have. That’s a hard barrier to cross! I will be digging into your work a little further.

By: Les

Les — Wed, 20 Nov 2013 17:14:13 +0000

Enjoyed the poem. It is sort of reading that makes you think about it for a long while. As for being on the convoy duty to transport supplies, my Dad at age 17 was on the LCT 159 transporting aviation fuel, ammunition and bombs from New Caledonia to Tulagi and then to Guadalcanal. He said sometimes, though, it was just a very large load of peanut butter and such. Japanese bombers would drop bombs at night well in front of them because their wake mimicked a much larger ship. He mentioned on subsequent invasions seeing other amphibious ships just disappear in a flash of light and noise. I imagine it was very boring duty until it wasn’t. But very essential.

By: SPEMack

SPEMack — Wed, 20 Nov 2013 15:30:34 +0000

I’m not big on poetry. I have a few lines of Kipling scrawled on the inside cover of my RainRiter and a couple of bits and pieces of Tennyson stuck in locker at work, but I’m not the type that can sit around and debate what makes poetry great. That being said, I enjoyed reading this Chris. It reminds me of “Death of a Ball Turret Gunner” by Randall Jarrell.http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-death-of-the-ball-turret-gunner-2

And it’s funny in a way, that both poems concern American fighting men in vunerable positions, with Browning heavy machine guns as protection.

There is certainly something to the old adage that everything changes and everything stays the same.

By: chrishernandezauthor

chrishernandezauthor — Wed, 20 Nov 2013 02:07:33 +0000

In reply to Street Soldier (aka COP).

Soldier,

Thanks, and I’m really not belittling the importance of the mission. It was an important mission, but it just sucked. One of my infantry friends who got stuck in my battalion said, “Running convoys isn’t a mission. It’s a detail.” But it was a real mission, and it kept our guys going. And in a way, we were lucky to get that mission. Others in my brigade got stuck with gate guard or retransmission site security for the entire year.