Wednesday, November 3, 2021

New Poem: 'Dune' Worm as Sandwich-Maker

The author of "Welcome to FOB Haiku" and "So Frag & So Bold" has published a poem written in the voice of the monstrous sandworms of Frank Herbert's 1966 science-fiction novel "Dune."

Poet Randy Brown's "The Quotable Shai-Hulud, Subway Sandwich Artist(tm), abridged" gives voice to the great worm as the sandwich-making employee of a national fast-food restaurant. The poem is presented as a series of maxims, most of which are based on lightly altered quotations from Herbert's original text.

For example, the poem begins:

"Bless the Sandwich-Maker and all His Ingredients. Bless the coming and going of Him, May His passing cleanse the world. May He keep the world for his people."

Herbert's epic space opera tells the story of political and military machinations around a singular desert planet called Arrakis, the universe's sole source of "Spice." Spice is a mineral that variously enables prophesy and intergalactic travel. Underground deposits of the cinnamon-like material often seem to be guarded by lumbering "sandworms," some of which can grow to be hundreds of meters in length.

Editors at The Daily Drunk Magazine, an on-line literary journal that often focuses on popular culture and film, had earlier solicited prose and poetry written to the prompt, "The sandworm from Dune takes a day job."

The novel "Dune" has recently been presented as a $165 million feature movie—the first of two parts—directed by Denis Villeneuve and starring Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya, and others.  The Daily Drunk Magazine reviewed the new movie "Dune" here.

Portions of Herbert's "Dune" books have previously been made into a 1985 feature film directed by David Lynch, and two Sci-Fi Channel mini-series: "Frank Herbert's Dune" (2000) and "Frank Herbert's Children of Dune" (2003).

In addition to Brown's poem, other "Dune"-inspired prose and poetry published this week by The Daily Drunk Magazine included:

You can follow The Daily Drunk Magazine on Twitter: @dailydrunkmag

Or on the World Wide Web: dailydrunkmag.com



Wednesday, October 27, 2021

New 'War Poems' are Pithy, Pulpy and ... Fun?!

“Every poet,” warns journalist and poet Randy Brown, “has a heart filled / with shrapnel.”

In his new chapbook SO FRAG & SO BOLD, the former U.S. Army “brigade staff jester” takes aim at endless wars, parent traps, social media, and stodgy religious beliefs. It’s an iconoclastic cluster-munition that’s bursting with more hundreds of haiku, aphorisms, philosophical puzzles, and other experiments in pithy and pulpy poetry.

Brown’s careful constructions of line-breaks and language are intended to variously provoke chuckles, empathy, and thought. “Any poem is a device,” he writes, “improvised to explode with meaning [...] ignited by a trigger / word.”

In addition to other accolades, Brown is a three-time poetry finalist in the Col. Darron L. Wright Memorial Awards, administered annually by the Chicago-based literary journal Line of Advance. His debut collection, Welcome to FOB Haiku: War Poems from Inside the Wire, was awarded a 2016 gold medal distinction from the Military Writers Society of America (MWSA).

In May-June 2011, Brown embedded as a civilian journalist with the Iowa Army National Guard’s 2nd Brigade Combat Team (B.C.T.), 34th Infantry “Red Bull” Division. He subsequently collated and helped publish Reporting for Duty: Citizen-Soldier Journalism from the Afghan Surge, 2010-2011an unabridged 668-page chronicle of that deployment. (Click here for short promotional video of the book.)

His poetry and non-fiction have appeared widely in print and on-line. As “Charlie Sherpa,” he blogs about modern war poetry at www.fobhaiku.com, and about writing on military themes at www.aimingcircle.org.

Starting Nov. 1, 2021:

SO FRAG & SO BOLD: Short Poems, Aphorisms & Other Wartime Fun (84 pages, Middle West Press LLC) is available in a $9.99 trade paperback edition through Amazon and other booksellers, as well as a $2.99 Kindle e-book edition exclusively via Amazon.

Middle West Press LLC (www.middlewestpress.com) is a Johnston, Iowa-based editor and publisher of non-fiction, journalism, and poetry. As an independent micro-press, we publish one to four titles annually. Our projects are often inspired by the people, places, and history of the American Midwest.

Saturday, September 11, 2021

New Poem Commemorates Sept. 11, 2001


The author of "Welcome to FOB Haiku" has new work appearing at The Wrath-Bearing Tree poetry feed on Twitter, in a project commemorating the 20th anniversary of the terrorist attacks of September 11.

The Wrath-Bearing Tree is an on-line journal of culture and politics often written from the perspectives of military family, veterans, and service members. Poems there are also often inspired by news events and headlines.

"The poem interrogates my memories and beliefs of 20 years ago," says Randy Brown, "and is intended to implicate my past/present roles both in the production of words, and in the production of war."

"I am once-again indebted to Wrath-Bearing Tree poetry editor Amalie Flynn and her colleagues, for prompting and presenting my work," he says.

Check out WBT Poetry on Twitter here: @wrathbtpoetry

You can directly access the poem on Twitter here at this link.






Thursday, July 8, 2021

'Pokémon Go' Haiku Now on NewVerseNews!


The author of "Welcome to FOB Haiku" has new poetry appearing in The New Verse News, a website that regularly presents "politically progressive poetry on current events and topical issues." Poems there are often inspired by recent news events and headlines.

Randy Brown's new work, titled "a veteran Pokémon Go trainer leaving Bagram, Afghanistan writes haiku" is based on recent downrange reporting by J.P. Lawrence at the newspaper Stars and Stripes. "It is a set of five snarky haiku-like war poems involving a Pokémon video game," says Brown. "Like they say, 'Gotta read them all!'"

You can read Brown's new poetry here.


As reported by Lawrence and others, U.S. military personnel last week reportedly abandoned Bagram Airfield (BAF), Parwan Province, Afghanistan without much coordination, if any, with Afghan officials. At the height of the "Afghan Surge" in 2010-2011, as partly documented in the 2016 collection of U.S. Army journalism "Reporting for Duty," the sprawling installation once housed more than 30,000 U.S. and Coalition troops.

Lawrence reports that Pokémon Go, an "Augmented Reality" (A.R.) video game in which players capture and train fantastical cartoon monsters using smart-phone cameras. Unlike U.S. troops, some of those virtual pets apparently remain in place at Bagram—and will do so in digital perpetuity.

As a former U.S. National Guard citizen-soldier, Lawrence has a grunt's-eye view and knack for finding new and original stories. "I'm always impressed with how J.P. finds fresh ways to illuminate what is going on in Afghanistan and Iraq," says Brown. "He's written about military stakeboarders, Afghan policewomen who write poetry, and the 'Zombielands' created after American bases are abandoned. And now, video games as a lens and metaphor through which to view our involvements and effects there."

A former newspaper journalist, Brown encourages other military-adjacent poets engage in artistic reactions to current events. In addition to The New Verse News, Brown notes, news-driven poetry markets include:

*****

Photo caption: Oct. 28, 2016—Airman 1st Class Quintin Rice, 50th Force Support Squadron, shows off his badge case at Schriever Air Force Base, Colorado. Rice earned the title “Pokémon master” after he collected all eight badges during the 50th Space Wing’s Chaplain’s Office’s “Pokémon challenge.” Photo by U.S. Air Force 2nd Lt. Scarlett Trujillo

Friday, April 2, 2021

Poetry, War, and the Places They Meet


Editor’s note: As previously noted on this blog, April is National Poetry Month! This essay originally appeared in the
April 2020 on-line edition of Consequence Magazine (recently relaunched as Consequence Forum).

No one gets into poetry for fame, glory, or money. As a “recovering journalist” (that’s a joke), I often quip that I’ve finally found a vocation that pays less than newspaper reporter: that of “citizen-soldier-poet.”

After years of writing and editing for newsstand consumer “how-to” magazines, concurrent with a 20-year career in the Iowa Army National Guard, I rediscovered poetry at a 2011 weekend writing workshop for military veterans. Hosted by a non-profit organization called “Writing My Way Back Home,” it was conducted on the campus of the University of Iowa, Iowa City.

After a 50-minute session reading soldierly poems—I don’t recall specific titles, so I’ll mention here Wilfred Owen’s 1917 “Dulce et Decorum Est” and Rudyard Kipling’s 1890 “Tommy” as two titles I now use in my own work with veterans—we were prompted to write freely for 10 minutes: “Write about smells, sounds, and other sense-based memories you associate with your experiences with the military.”

(Here’s a quick pro tip: Framing the prompt that way works for “civilian” audiences as well. After all, as the calendar flips toward nearly 20 years of war, every one of us—taxpayer, voter, citizen—has at least some connection with the culture and consequences of war. )

A few months earlier in 2011, I embedded as a freelance journalist with a brigade of Iowa citizen-soldiers deployed to Afghanistan. There, I’d again experienced the familiar tang of diesel-truck fumes, the staccato-chop of helicopters overhead, and the lulling background buzz of Uncle Sam’s electrical generators. But I had also encountered the frictions of changed contexts and perspectives.

As a member of the media, for example, I was prohibited from wearing a camouflage uniform or carrying a weapon—foreign concepts to any graduate of Army basic training. More than once during those weeks, I woke up in my bunk, sweating and panicked, hands flailing in the dark, trying to find my AWOL rifle. You think old habits die hard? Boot camp habits die harder. Call it the Ghost of Drill Sergeants Past.

So, at the workshop, I wrote my first war poem. It was about a hug.

The hug had bothered me for months. It was not a big event. It was not “news.” It was a small and unworthy thing—insufficient materiel, I thought, for even a blog post or postcard back home. And yet, it irritated my brain with the persistence of grit in an oyster. When I first arrived in Afghanistan, my former brigade commander—a man I respected and still feared, and who commanded the lives of 3,000 of my fellow Iowans—had greeted me not with a handshake, nor with a salute (I was now a civilian, after all), but with a hug.

I had spent months trying to figure out what that meant.

It took a poem for me to figure it out.

Author and Iraq War veteran Jason Poudrier (Red Fields, 2012) once told me about how he uses the practice of writing poetry to freeze moments, and to hold them up to inspection from different angles. Poetry, he said, allows for metaphor, uncertainty, contradiction, nuance. One thing can mean many things. Memories can be acknowledged—even honored—without having to be resolved. Then, after they are written down, they can be placed on a shelf—perhaps to be forgotten, perhaps to be reflected upon again later. Perhaps, even to be published, and shared with others.

The words that resulted from 10 minutes of workshop-prompted reflection were later polished and published as “Normally, a serious man”:

Normally a serious man,

the brigade commander gives you a hug

and later a coin.

You keep turning up like a bad penny, he says.


You have followed him

across deserts and oceans.

First in uniform, now out of it.

You dress yourself these days.


Friends downrange frequently call attention

to your color-filled wardrobe.

You are only following the rules, you tell them.

Camouflage, according to the Army, might make you a target.


The colonel’s coins are numbered.

Two hundred and forty-nine have come before,

but you are a first:

once part of the tribe, but no longer in the fight.


You showed up like Justice,

who also jumped on the plane late.

He got killed while pinned down 

trying to secure a helicopter crash.


You are here to share in stories like that.


The coin is worthless, of course,

but it will pay your way back across the water,

once you have found yourself

at war.


“Why the hug?” you ask your buddies later.

It is because you are like a puppy, they say.

You remind the Old Man of better days.

You are no longer dangerous.


You are a puppy.


You are a penny.


You are home.

In 2019, I co-edited a Military Writers Guild-sponsored anthology, Why We Write: Craft Essays on Writing War. Our contributors included poets and playwrights, novelists and educators, soldiers and sailors, think-tankers, historians, and more. Each was a practitioner of writing about war and national security topics, across various genres, platforms, and literary forms.

In one essay, “Recovering the Rhythm of War,” author and veteran Bill McCloud told about how he generated a 2017 collection of poems after re-reading a stack of 52 letters—words he had originally written as a U.S. soldier serving in Vietnam in the years 1968-1969. “When we first return from war, many of us choose either to not talk about it at all (for a variety of reasons), or to talk about it strictly by describing our own personal experiences. We make no attempt, early on, to fit ourselves into the big picture,” McCloud wrote. “I was ready to fit myself, the everyman, into the puzzle.”

My part-time military career was full of disappointments and joys, but it was hardly the stuff of movies and recruiting posters. I’d been an average soldier—a middle-manager in uniform. I was never the smartest, strongest, or highest-ranking person in the room. My Army job involved pushing buttons, connecting wires, and delivering messages. I never fired my weapon in anger. I did sling a few sandbags at home in Iowa. And I got a “combat patch” for overseas peacekeeping duty. Still, as a National Guard member, I was proud to serve my community and my country. Through my service, I had experiences and made friends I’d never have otherwise encountered.

For me, poetry has been one way to assemble those fragments of memory, to add personal and historical contexts to them, and to extract potential meaning from them.

When I read Owen’s words from 1917, denouncing the platitude he calls “the old Lie”—that it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country—I think about the betrayal some of today’s veterans feel when hearing about peace talks with the Taliban.

And when I read Kipling’s words about how civil society fails its military veterans—the 19th century equivalent to a meme about “Thank You for Your Service”—I think about how my fellow citizens spent a year “building capacity” on behalf of the Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, but returned to unemployment, uncertainty, and eroding civil rights at home.

And when I read McCloud’s essay and new poetry from the Vietnam War, I connect my own “everyman” military experiences to a larger societal puzzle: We are each part of a long narrative. We are each boots on the ground. We are all in this together.

Poetry makes this conversation possible. I’ve seen it during poetry readings and book events. I’ve also seen it during breakfast, while reading the social media feeds of my fellow poets. Recent war poetry from U.S. military service members and families is as rich and varied as that from World Wars I and II, as well as wars in Korea, Vietnam, and the Persian Gulf—and the Cold War years between.

Thanks to the Internet, war poetry has never been more accessible. As a start, consider this friendly barrage of verse from modern airmen, soldiers, Marines, spouses, and others:
Poetry opens up the spaces for mutual empathy and understanding, for building metaphorical bridges across the equally metaphorical “civil-military gap.” So, military service members, veterans, families, and others: Write or read a war poem or two. Read it aloud. Share it with others. Talk about it.

April is National Poetry Month. Have you hugged a war poet today?

*****


Randy Brown embedded with his former Iowa Army National Guard unit as a civilian journalist in Afghanistan, May-June 2011. A 20-year veteran with a previous overseas deployment, he subsequently authored the 2015 poetry collection Welcome to FOB Haiku: War Poems from Inside the Wire. He also co-edited the 2019 Military Writers Guild-sponsored anthology Why We Write: Craft Essays on Writing War. Since 2015, he has been the poetry editor at As You Were, the literary journal of the non-profit organization Military Experience & the Arts. As “Charlie Sherpa,” he blogs about poetry at www.fobhaiku.com, and about military-themed writing at www.aimingcircle.org.

Thursday, April 1, 2021

Listen Up, Maggots! It's National Poetry Month!

PHOTO BY: U.S. Army Sgt. Ken Scar

This post, written by the author of FOB Haiku: War Poems from Inside the Wire, originally appeared on the Red Bull Rising blog April 6, 2016. It also was featured in the 2019 Military Writers Guild anthology Why We Write: Craft Essays on Writing War.

When packing for one of my first training experiences with the U.S. Army, back in the late 1980s, I knew that free time and footlocker space would be at a premium. I could live without luxuries like my Walkman cassette player for a few months. I also wanted to avoid too much gruff from drill sergeants. So I stuffed a paperback copy of Shakespeare's "Henry V" into my left cargo pocket, wrapped in a plastic sandwich bag, as my sole entertainment.

If nothing else, I thought, I'd work on my memorization skills. ("Oh, for a muse of fire-guard duty …") Little did I realize that so much of my brain would already be filled, starting those summer months at Fort Knox, Ky., with the nursery rhymes of Uncle Sam. Training was full of poetry. Sometimes, it was profane. "This is my rifle, this is my gun!" Sometimes, it was pedagogical. "I will turn the tourniquet / to stop the flow / of the bright red blood." There were even times that it was nearly pathological. "What is the spirit of the bayonet?! / Kill! Kill! Kill!"

These basic phrases connected us new recruits to the yellow footprints of those who had stood here before, marched in our boots, squared the same corners, weathered the same abuses. Every time we moved, we were serenaded by sergeants. Counting cadence, calling cadence, bemoaning that Jody was back home, dating our women, drinking our beer. We learned our lines, our ranks, our patches, our places as much by tribal story-telling than by reading the effing field manual. Even our soldier humor was hand-me-down wisdom, tossed off like singsong hand grenades. Phrases like, "Don't call me 'sir' / I work for a living!" and "You were bet-ter off when you left! / You're right!"

Nobody's quite sure why April got the nod as National Poetry Month. I like to think that it's because of that line from T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland""April is the cruelest month." Because that sounds like the Army. Besides, in springtime, the thoughts of every warrior-poet lightly turns to baseball; showers that bring flowers ("If it ain't raining / it ain't training!"); and the start of fighting season in Afghanistan.

Poetry, I recognize, isn't every soldier's three cups of tea. Ever since I entertained my platoon mates with Prince Harry's inspiring St. Crispin's Day speech, however, I've enjoyed sneaking poetry into the conversation. Perhaps more soldiers would appreciate poetry, were they to realize the inherent poetics of military life:

Every time you go to war, you are engaged in a battle for narrative. Every deployment—individually as a soldier, or collectively as an Army or nation—is a story. Every story has a beginning, middle, and end. Every story is subject to vision, and revision. History isn't always written by the victors, but it is re-written by poets. Treat them well. Otherwise, they will cut you.

Every time you eat soup with a knife, you are wielding a metaphor. Every "boots on the ground," every "line in the sand," every Hollywood-style named operation ("Desert Shield"! "Desert Storm"! "Enduring Freedom"!) is a metaphor that shapes our understanding of a war and its objectives. If you don't understand the dangerous end of a metaphor, you shouldn't be issued one.

(There's also a corollary, and a warning: As missions change, so do metaphors. In other words, when a politician trots out a new metaphor for war, better check your six.)

Every poem is a fragment of intelligence, a piece in the puzzle. A poem can slow down time, describe a moment in lush and flushed detail. It can transport the reader to a different time, a different battlefield. Most importantly, a poem can describe the experience of military life and death through someone else's eyes—a spouse, a villager, a soldier, a journalist. Poetry, in short, is a training opportunity for empathy.

Soldiers like to say that the enemy gets a vote, so it's worth noting that the enemy writes poetry, too. Like reading doctrine and monitoring propaganda, reading an enemy's verse reveals motivations and values. Sun Tzu writes:
If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.
Every time you quote a master, from Sun Tzu to Schwarzkopf, you are delivering aphorism. I liken the aphorism—a quotable-quote or maxim—to be akin to concise forms of poetry, such as haiku. In fact, in my expansive view, I think aphorisms should count as poetry. In the world of word craft, it can take as much effort to hone an effective aphorism than it does to write a 1,000-word essay. Aphorisms are laser-guided missiles, rather than carpet bombs. We should all spend our words more wisely.

Reading a few lines connects us to the thin red line of soldiers past, present, and future. Poetry puts us in the boots of those who have served before, hooks our chutes to a larger history and experience of war. The likes of Shakespeare's "band of brothers" speech, John McRae's "In Flanders Fields," and Rudyard Kipling's poem "Tommy" continue to speak to the experiences and sentiments of modern soldiers.

I am happy to report that more-contemporary war poets have continued the march.

Here's a quick list to probe the front lines of modern war poetry: From World War II, seek out Henry Reed's "The Naming of Parts." For a jolt of Vietnam Era parody, read Alan Farrell's "The Blaming of Parts." From the Iraq War, Brian Turner's "Here, Bullet." In this tight shot group, modern soldiers will no doubt recognize themselves, their tools, and their times. Here is industrial-grade boredom, an assembly line of war, punctuated with humor and grit, gunpowder and lead.

Want more? Check out print and on-line literary offerings from Veterans Writing Project's "O-Dark-Thirty" quarterly literary journal; Military Experience & the Arts' twice-annual "As You Were"; the "Line of Advance" journal; and Southeast Missouri State University's "Proud to Be: Writing by American Warriors" annual anthology series.

Finally, you can buy an pocket anthology of poetry, such as the Everyman's Library Pocket Poets edition of "War Poems" from Knopf, or Ebury's "Heroes: 100 Poems from the New Generation of War Poets." Stuff it in your left cargo pocket. Read a page a day as a secular devotional, a meditation on war. Or, pick a favorite poem, print it out, and post it on the wall of your fighting position or office cube. Read the same poem, over and over again, during the course of a few weeks. See how it changes. See how it changes in you.

Remember: It's National Poetry Month. And every time you read a war poem, an angel gets its Airborne wings.

*****

Randy Brown embedded with his former Iowa Army National Guard unit as a civilian journalist in Afghanistan, May-June 2011. He authored the poetry collection Welcome to FOB Haiku: War Poems from Inside the Wire. Recently, he co-edited the Military Writers Guild anthology Why We Write: Craft Essays on Writing War. He is the current poetry editor of Military Experience and the Arts' "As You Were" literary journal, and a member of the Military Writers Guild. As "Charlie Sherpa," he blogs about citzien-soldier culture at www.redbullrising.com and military writing at www.aimingcircle.org.

Friday, March 5, 2021

‘10 Haiku about Operation Desert Storm’


Feb. 24, 2021 marked the 30th anniversary of the start of the 1991 coalition ground campaign to liberate Kuwait called Operation Desert Storm.

Hostilities ended in a cease-fire approximately 100 hours later, on Feb. 28, 1991.

The poem series “10 haiku about Operation Desert Storm,” by Randy Brown, first appeared in the anthology Proud to Be: Writing by American Warriors, Vol. 6, published by Southeast Missouri State University Press 2017.

In recognition and reflection on this anniversary, this blog is daily posting one of these haiku poems. This is the first time these haiku have been presented in a visual format.

Haiku No. 10:

Pottery Barn rule
said “You break it, you own it.”
That’s why we’re still there.

Thursday, March 4, 2021

‘10 Haiku about Operation Desert Storm’


Feb. 24, 2021 marked the 30th anniversary of the start of the 1991 coalition ground campaign to liberate Kuwait called Operation Desert Storm.

Hostilities ended in a cease-fire approximately 100 hours later, on Feb. 28, 1991.

The poem series “10 haiku about Operation Desert Storm,” by Randy Brown, first appeared in the anthology Proud to Be: Writing by American Warriors, Vol. 6, published by Southeast Missouri State University Press 2017.

In recognition and reflection on this anniversary, this blog is daily posting one of these haiku poems. This is the first time these haiku have been presented in a visual format.

Haiku No. 9:

A “Line in the Sand.”
A hundred-hour ground war.
A “Highway of Death.”

Wednesday, March 3, 2021

‘10 Haiku about Operation Desert Storm’


Feb. 24, 2021 marked the 30th anniversary of the start of the 1991 coalition ground campaign to liberate Kuwait called Operation Desert Storm.

Hostilities ended in a cease-fire approximately 100 hours later, on Feb. 28, 1991.

The poem series “10 haiku about Operation Desert Storm,” by Randy Brown, first appeared in the anthology Proud to Be: Writing by American Warriors, Vol. 6, published by Southeast Missouri State University Press 2017.

In recognition and reflection on this anniversary, this blog is daily posting one of these haiku poems. This is the first time these haiku have been presented in a visual format.

Haiku No. 8:

Midnight at high noon.
Oil wells burn the air black.
War is hell on Earth.

Tuesday, March 2, 2021

‘10 Haiku about Operation Desert Storm’


Feb. 24, 2021 marked the 30th anniversary of the start of the 1991 coalition ground campaign to liberate Kuwait called Operation Desert Storm.

Hostilities ended in a cease-fire approximately 100 hours later, on Feb. 28, 1991.

The poem series “10 haiku about Operation Desert Storm,” by Randy Brown, first appeared in the anthology Proud to Be: Writing by American Warriors, Vol. 6, published by Southeast Missouri State University Press 2017.

In recognition and reflection on this anniversary, this blog is daily posting one of these haiku poems. This is the first time these haiku have been presented in a visual format.

Haiku No. 7:

The nightly sports scores:
“Scuds vs. the Patriots”—
bombs bursting in air!

Monday, March 1, 2021

‘10 Haiku about Operation Desert Storm’


Feb. 24, 2021 marked the 30th anniversary of the start of the 1991 coalition ground campaign to liberate Kuwait called Operation Desert Storm.

Hostilities ended in a cease-fire approximately 100 hours later, on Feb. 28, 1991.

The poem series “10 haiku about Operation Desert Storm,” by Randy Brown, first appeared in the anthology Proud to Be: Writing by American Warriors, Vol. 6, published by Southeast Missouri State University Press 2017.

In recognition and reflection on this anniversary, this blog is daily posting one of these haiku poems. This is the first time these haiku have been presented in a visual format.

Haiku No. 6:

Laser-guided gaze
reveals war is really just
Super Nintendo.

Sunday, February 28, 2021

‘10 Haiku about Operation Desert Storm’


Feb. 24, 2021 marked the 30th anniversary of the start of the 1991 coalition ground campaign to liberate Kuwait called Operation Desert Storm.

Hostilities ended in a cease-fire approximately 100 hours later, on Feb. 28, 1991.

The poem series “10 haiku about Operation Desert Storm,” by Randy Brown, first appeared in the anthology Proud to Be: Writing by American Warriors, Vol. 6, published by Southeast Missouri State University Press 2017.

In recognition and reflection on this anniversary, this blog is daily posting one of these haiku poems. This is the first time these haiku have been presented in a visual format.

Haiku No. 5:

Voice of Darth Vader
adds commercial gravitas:
“This ... is C.N.N.”

Saturday, February 27, 2021

‘10 Haiku about Operation Desert Storm’


Feb. 24, 2021 marked the 30th anniversary of the start of the 1991 coalition ground campaign to liberate Kuwait called Operation Desert Storm.

Hostilities ended in a cease-fire approximately 100 hours later, on Feb. 28, 1991.

The poem series “10 haiku about Operation Desert Storm,” by Randy Brown, first appeared in the anthology Proud to Be: Writing by American Warriors, Vol. 6, published by Southeast Missouri State University Press 2017.

In recognition and reflection on this anniversary, this blog is daily posting one of these haiku poems. This is the first time these haiku have been presented in a visual format.

Haiku No. 4:

Anti-aircraft guns
shooting stars over Baghdad.
Show made for T.V. 

Friday, February 26, 2021

‘10 Haiku about Operation Desert Storm’


Feb. 24, 2021 marked the 30th anniversary of the start of the 1991 coalition ground campaign to liberate Kuwait called Operation Desert Storm.

Hostilities ended in a cease-fire approximately 100 hours later, on Feb. 28, 1991.

The poem series “10 haiku about Operation Desert Storm,” by Randy Brown, first appeared in the anthology Proud to Be: Writing by American Warriors, Vol. 6, published by Southeast Missouri State University Press 2017.

In recognition and reflection on this anniversary, this blog is daily posting one of these haiku poems. This is the first time these haiku have been presented in a visual format.

Haiku No. 3:

Saddam promises
the “Mother of All Battles”
if we take Kuwait.

Thursday, February 25, 2021

‘10 Haiku about Operation Desert Storm’

Feb. 24, 2021 marked the 30th anniversary of the start of the 1991 coalition ground campaign to liberate Kuwait called Operation Desert Storm.

Hostilities ended in a cease-fire approximately 100 hours later, on Feb. 28, 1991.

The poem series “10 haiku about Operation Desert Storm,” by Randy Brown, first appeared in the anthology Proud to Be: Writing by American Warriors, Vol. 6, published by Southeast Missouri State University Press 2017.

In recognition and reflection on this anniversary, this blog is daily posting one of these haiku poems. This is the first time these haiku have been presented in a visual format.

Haiku No. 2:

Origami plane /
a stealthy crease in the dark /
radar doesn't see.

Wednesday, February 24, 2021

‘10 Haiku about Operation Desert Storm’

Feb. 24, 2021 marks the 30th anniversary of the start of the 1991 coalition ground campaign to liberate Kuwait called Operation Desert Storm.

Hostilities ended in a cease-fire approximately 100 hours later, on Feb. 28, 1991.

The poem series “10 haiku about Operation Desert Storm,” by Randy Brown, first appeared in the anthology Proud to Be: Writing by American Warriors, Vol. 6, published by Southeast Missouri State University Press 2017.

In recognition and reflection on this anniversary, this blog will daily post one of these haiku poems for the next 10 days. This is the first time these haiku have been presented in a visual format.

Haiku No. 1:

Boonie hat. Suede boots.
“Chocolate-chip” camouflage.
Gas mask on my hip.