A Downed Black Pilot Learns How To Fly by Horace Coleman

The practice of writing one’s experience of war is as old as literature itself; Julius Caesar penned the Commentarii more than 2000 years ago, and since then we’ve had many more. But few of those memoirs of battle are written in poetic form, and few are so gripping and haunting as Horace Coleman’s In the Grass. Serving as a lieutenant in the US Air Force, Coleman returned to America and became a writer and a teacher, as well as a committed member of both Veterans for Peace and Vietnam Veterans Against the War.
His poetry is dense and compact, steeped in first-hand awareness of the awfulness of war and its impact on the minorities and poor people who too often end up fighting it. In his “Notes for the Veteran’s War Protest”, he wrote, “We are sorry we murdered our souls. We did as told but we learned how to say NO!” His strength of will is apparent in his verse, and his morality was ever present in his words.

Some war poems emphasize heroism, patriotism, honour and the like, while others emphasize suffering, death, fear and loss. What do these two perspectives on war tell us?