In the winter of 1966, as one of my duties in the US Army Corp of Engineers, I went to a warehouse that was on the outskirts of Ton Son Nhut airport, Saigon, to measure it and calculate the square meters - to check if the lease cost the US was paying was under the ceiling price established by our embassy. Inside the warehouse were military coffins. I've tried to remember how many, but I can't. The were aluminum with airtight seals, and vacuum fittings. They were painted olive drab, but the paint was flaking off exposing blotches of the metal. They were stacked 5 high, and there must have been 10 rows x 10 coffins long. 500 coffins? Something like that.

You don't do anything in the Army without a set of orders, including a new duty assignment to eternity. So at the end of each coffin was a designated area to paste the dead soldier's final orders on. I could see the orders, although the coffins were empty. Name, rank, serial number, destination and so forth. I was looking at one, and I noticed that the corner of the sheet was peeled up, and I tore it and discovered another order beneath for a different soldier. I looked at other coffins, and discovered that they were all 3 or 4 orders deep. I might have been looking at the footprint of 2,000 or more KIAs.

It felt strange. I was alone in there, and after 6 months in country it was just automatic to turn yourself off - so that defensive numbness prevailed. But I remember a sense of detachment, the the "you" of you is not occupying your body. I put my clipboard and tape measure on the floor, leaned against a steel column, lit up a cigarette, and just regarded this "thing" before my eyes.

And I can remember what I was thinking about. I was imagining some little town in the mid west that had a factory that manufactured these coffins. I imagined the workers getting up in the morning, drinking coffee, dressing and going to work in the metal fabrication shop. Grinders throwing off sparks, heliarc flashes, the rapping of rivet guns, trucks with materials being off loaded with fork lifts and so on. Then I started thinking about how long people have been making their living building these coffins. At what point did someone in procurement at the Pentagon announce the bidding opportunity for the contract? Who decided when that we would need these things? Then I thought "Shit, this was planned all along. No wonder it's happening! And I left.

Nice poem, Diachronic. At least we get to see the coffins come home now.

President George W. Bush, eight years ago today, in his first press conference after launching the Afghan war, conceded he didn't know when the conflict would end. "People often ask me, 'How long will this last?' " he said 96 hours after the invasion began. "It may happen tomorrow, it may happen a month from now, it may take a year or two, but we will prevail." [Time, 10/07/09]

8 years. And.we.have.not.prevailed.