Dog Food
As a child coming of age in Middle Georgia at the end of the 1970’s, I walked through a smoldering world of the Deep South that mixed the detritus of the Civil War with that of the 1960’s. As a teenager graduating high school in 1980, most of my teachers were themselves the front of that demographic wave called Baby Boomers, a wave that demographers say includes me. In my world then, the Confederate flag on the back of pickup trucks was as ubiquitous as the peace symbol on the back of aging VW bugs and vans. While I never felt like I was a Confederate (my father was born in Havana, Cuba) or a Boomer — Howdy Doody was not even available in reruns when I watched TV — I came to understand during college that my worldview was shaped through the lens of their losses: the South’s at the hands of the North, and the US in Vietnam. The Civil War was the one that “we” should have won, fought by men of honor. I would have to visit the Lincoln Memorial to finally get the idea that slavery, and the economics of that horrific practice, underpinned every reason the South fought. And Vietnam was the Boomers’ war. In college, the specter of that war often hovered over conversations I had with professors who were just old enough to remember the anxiety of wondering if they would be called up to fight the land war in Asia. (Some professors were older. I recall one distinctly as no-nonsense but still cool because he would let us smoke in class if no one objected. I can say without any doubt I never had a problem staying awake in his class, even if we did smell like ashtrays walking back to the dorm. He had been on a landing craft off the coast of Japan in August of 1945, waiting to invade the main island. He thought the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the best things that ever happened.) I was (am) a Boomer by accident of birth, much too young to have served in Vietnam, but that war, like the Civil War, was stamped into my psyche by those who led me to adulthood.
Along the way I came to have a passion for reading, and most of what I read (that was considered literature) touched on war. Stephen Crane, William Faulkner, and Earnest Hemingway gave way to writers like John Del Vecchio and his The 13th Valley. Somehow, surrounded by all that was bad about losing a war, I decided I was up for an experience in the crucible of combat. In addition to the inchoate, immature sense that life in a war zone might be thrilling, by 1982 I was out of money, though I had a decent GPA. I got an ROTC scholarship that allowed me to stay in school, and I kept reading. I got my degree in English, a commission in the US Army as a second lieutenant of Armor, and kept reading as I began my own odyssey.
Those decisions as a 19-year-old liberal arts major turned out to have profound effects on the rest of my life. After four runs through four different hostile fire zones, I learned something about art and culture.
I have come to realize that the reason I appreciate art — any art: words, music, pictures — is that it can occur at all. Like most soldiers of the last 40 years who went to war on the orders of our president, I saw people at their worst and best. Despicable butchery mingled with eye-watering selflessness are the inflection points of my walk. Those experiences left me amazed that anybody, somebody, somewhere, at some point in time, had the presence of mind and lived in circumstances that allowed him or her the luxury to look up from survival mode and produce something for others to consider, something of lasting human value. That fact is for me nothing short of miraculous. That there are cultures throughout the world that honor such efforts is probably proof of a God of some sort. How does anything good come from a species of mammal that can do what we (what I) have done in the name of patriotism?
Poetry especially seems to be the medium recounting human experience able to survive the passage of time best of all, though it’s also the easiest to misinterpret once removed by time from its original context. I have read most of the masters, but Shakespeare stands out, and not just because he is Shakespeare. I cannot count the times St. Crispin’s Day Speech from Henry V has been read to me upon return from an operation, and it always makes me tear up. I bow to the other pillars of the literary pantheon. However, through the years, poems from Wilfred Owen came to resonate with me the most. I have muttered “Dulce et decorum est, Pro patria mori” in ironic tones more than once. Recently I discovered Yusef Komunyakaa (another Southerner) and his collection Dien Cai Dau. I would not have been able to relate to his poems except for my time in Afghanistan in 2012. With that last rock in my ruck, I get him. I read a quote of his in an interview where he mentioned that he had grown up in the church and considered the book of Psalms to be poetry.
On a quiet morning, at the beginning of 2023, I read Psalm 83. Like Komunyakaa, I consider the Psalms of the Bible to be poems. Psalm 83 is Israel asking God to destroy its enemies. This line came off the page for me: "...who were destroyed at Endor, who became dung for the ground."
At that moment I remembered thirty-one years ago being in a desert, the same desert where this verse was likely written. I was in my tank, at night, the oil wells were burning (I could hear them), and it was day three of the ground war in Desert Storm. I had not eaten anything for those three days and was choking down a ration from an envelope while watching the world in front of me through night vision goggles. A few hundred meters away were the dead of an Iraqi unit, left to lay where they had fallen. I watched the wild dogs tear into their corpses. In shades of green, black, and white, I could see (and will forever see) the image of a dog-shaped silhouette executing the classic headshake used to rip meat from a carcass that had once been someone’s son.
Reading the passage in an easy chair, drinking coffee from a clean cup, and being thirty-one years removed from that night in the Iraqi desert gave me pause.
I know what it means for my enemies to become dung on the earth. At 60, I am the product of art and culture, and I find some solace in knowing there is nothing new in my experiences. The verses of all those who have gone before remind me to get over myself when I consider how I helped make dog food while fires like hell roared around me.
Originally from Macon, Georgia, Tony Schwalm spent much of his adult life as an Army officer, serving as a tank company commander in the First Gulf War in 1991 and leading Green Berets during the Haiti invasion in 1994. Retiring from the Army in 2004, he works as a consultant to the Department of Defense and lectures to business students at the University of South Florida on the merits of improvisation as learned in the world of guerrilla warfare. In 2009, his essay, Trek, won first prize at the Mayborn Literary Non-fiction Conference at the University of North Texas and was the basis for the book The Guerrilla Factory: the Making of Special Force Officers, the Green Berets published by Simon and Schuster in 2012. He makes his home in Tampa, Florida.
