The Sword and Laser discussion

Here's the last question from the reading group guide about the title of the novel. I wanted to make this a separate topic so I could include the poem.

12. The title Some Desperate Glory comes from the poem "Dulce et Decorum Est" by Wilfred Owen, written about his experience in the First World War. Read the poem -- what point does Owen make about war? What does the title have to do with Kyr's story?

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem...

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 gas-shells dropping softly 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 flound’ring 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.

Notes:
Latin phrase is from the Roman poet Horace: “It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.”

I've sat with that poem all day. Text is visceral for me and always has been. I'm familiar with many poems with not dissimilar themes, but didn't know that one. I also read the poem aloud a number of times bringing my training in oral interpretation into play with the text.

With only a couple of thousand people, Gaea is more a cult under the direct control of a single man than an army or a full-blown society. And I see in the acknowledgements that Emily Tesh drew on at least one resource about Scientology and likely other such material. Though not on any large scale and mixed in with a lot of other stuff, I do have some childhood experience with religious cults and could feel some of those dynamics at work, especially with Aulus Jole.

But the main focus of the book was the sort of glorification of military force that remains all too common. And the subject of that poem brought back to mind some elements of my training. Skip my comment if you want to avoid discussion of chemical weapons used in warfare.

My maternal grandfather was ... a complicated man to put it generously. But he was generally helpful to me in a lot of ways that helped me navigate childhood and life as an undiagnosed autistic person. I believe he was trying to do better at that later stage in life than he had with his children. He was also a WWII pilot. It's not something he spoke much about but I know he felt his service had some meaning.

My father-in-law served as an Air Force munitions officer in Korea. His stories were about ways he dodged getting drafted into the Army when he was given advance warning his card was up and enlisted in the Air Force instead. And then ways he used that service to help gain advantages for his later moves up the social and income ladder. He never had anything good to say about the war itself.

My Dad was drafted into Vietnam after finishing his bachelor's degree and before going on to graduate school. There was a complex, off the books "deal" that got him out in 18 months total service instead of 3 years by volunteering for a special forward recon program. (He had no clue going in what he was agreeing to.) The few stories he did share with me were pretty horrific, even when told for their element of dark humor. And I remember episodes of major PTSD flashbacks in the late 70s. The intensity and duration of the flashbacks lessened over time but I don't think he was ever truly free of that war. And part of his health issues were the many different chemicals he was exposed to there.

He was ... not happy when I enlisted in the Army National Guard. Mostly it was pragmatic on my end. I was struggling as a very young teen parent and husband during the worst recession between the Great Depression and the Great Recession of 2008. (It's the Reagan Recession nobody ever seems to remember.) It provided full pay and benefits during initial training and then a steady reliable additional paycheck without the same sort of commitment as enlisting in the regular Army. I ended up serving almost 8 years in the Guard, starting in Arkansas, but mostly the Texas National Guard. I was actually discharged right before Iraq invaded Kuwait, so in one of the few comparatively peaceful periods, though the "Cold War" was raging.

I considered what it meant to serve my country, especially given its history. (I clearly remember reading "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee" the first time in 4th grade. And I had studied and absorbed tons of material, including lots of source documents and writings, about the Civil War even younger. One of those autistic special interests. I had no illusions about the nature of our history.) I was never one of those "children ardent for some desperate glory." But I certainly encountered many of them. My Dad had stories of the from 'Nam. From his perspective, they were the ones mostly likely to get themselves and others killed.

But I'm not magically immune to the intense effects of basic training. It's something of an art form and I studied material on how to construct military training later in my time in service. It's designed to break people down and build them back up so they can act cohesively together under pressure in a very short period of time. I've kept the experience of what that felt like with me as a reference point.

And then I spent much of my time as the NBC NCO for my finance unit. And they sent me to all the training for that specialty. That NBC is Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical defense. I learned how to plan operations in contaminated (chemical or nuclear radiation) areas. I learned and practiced setting up decontamination facilities. I learned how to calculate decay rates. And we studied the effects of different chemical weapons. At some length.

The one everyone thinks about from WWI is mustard gas. But that poem is about the first one used, chlorine gas. "As under a green sea, I saw him drowning" is a dead giveaway. And I remembered the films I watched of experiments of different agents on animals. The effect of mustard gas, a blister agent, on unprotected lungs isn't all that much different really. It's more effective because it's harder to filter and disperse and because it can also disable troops with massive sores even if their lungs and eyes remain protected with effective protective gear.

There's one lengthy film of a study performed by the Australian military where they got volunteers to sit in a chamber with protective masks exposed to a blister agent for a few minutes at the start of each day and then go run an obstacle course. They measured how quickly it degraded performance to the point they couldn't complete the course. (We all agreed the Aussie soldiers were nuts to agree to a study like that. But they kept egging each other on.)

But in the poem, I could see the man dying, "blood come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs," I could see him dying like all those videos stuck in my head of animals dying, some from agents that act much like the one described in the poem. I could feel the horror of it to my core.

I don't have magic answers that would produce a world free of war and conflict. Given what humans can do to one another, sometimes the only way to resist is to fight back. But much of the time war seems to be just another tool to enrich the wealthy and powerful. Eisenhower was spot on in his warning.

But even when there is no other discernible path to fight for survival, for those you love, against an actual immediate threat, war is never good. It is never noble. It destroys some part of the humanity of everyone trapped in it, even if they survive or prevail.

The poem captures that. And I think the novel did as well. It's one of the reasons I liked it. There were no "good" outcomes offered. Nobody was a hero. Nobody was okay at any point. Nobody was left undamaged.

Thanks for sharing your personal story Scott! It’s very interesting to hear a perspective on this book from someone who’s actually undergone military training and service, and has a family history of military service as well - albeit thankfully not within a totalitarian cult of space fascists.

And thank you for sharing the full text of the poem - I had read it before at school but that was more years ago than I care to mention. It’s incredibly visceral stuff.