Things Worth Remembering: Finding Meaning in the Madness of War
U.S. Marines are seen during the Vietnam War in April 1968. (Photo by Terry Fincher/Express/Getty Images)
Memorizing poetry began as a way to kill time in the Marines. It turned into a lesson in how to live with the possibility of death.
Produced by ElevenLabs using AI narration
Welcome to Things Worth Remembering, in which writers share a poem or a paragraph that all of us should commit to heart. This week, former Marine Corps officer Phil Klay marks Veterans Day by reflecting on William Butler Yeats’s “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death”—and what it taught him about the strange horror and beauty of war.
It wasn’t all the yelling and running and push-ups and crawling through mud that I found difficult during my Marine Corps training; it was the boredom.
Fire watch—standing guard while others sleep—is boring. Waiting around at the rifle range is boring. Humping is boring, if only because “humping” does not mean what you think it does (it means a forced march, usually while carrying heavy gear).
Marines dealt with the boredom in different ways. My method was to memorize poetry.
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