All For Count Down Kill
By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
A sprawling anti-war poem that traces the Vietnam conflict from Pentagon showrooms to cockpit to ocean, layering military-industrial spectacle, atomic weaponry, and the aesthetics of aerial bombardment into a vision of destruction so total it makes Renaissance painting abstract by comparison.
A two-page anti-war broadside that opens just past Vietnam ('The Vietnam War is done none to soon') and follows the war economy as it retools for the next market: a 'Pentagon limousine arrives at the showroom / of GO***GO cigar girls and cocktails,' where a businessman opens 'his belly of revenge' and 'selling now concerns the Middle East.' It tracks the pilot of 'THE ABSOLUTE BIRD' as he is reduced to a function - 'mission must finger button push' - delivering 'Intentional celestial destruction' as 'bloody beauty / thet makes Raphael at lest abstract.' The poem ends on a sworn personal limit: 'And war I have only known one to one / But battle lose the duelity I will not / Of how intensely insane is slaughter / MamfPactured to drop on the objectivity of a dot.'
The poem's argument is that automated war converts killing into commerce and into an obscene new aesthetic - 'the chemical blaze / of good=by charred humanity / Against the sky smeared canvas / of bloody beauty.' The pilot is the moral center precisely because he has been emptied of agency into 'a crack clocked timed being,' so that exoneration arrives as 'scientific exorcisms.' Against this the speaker stakes the one-to-one combat he has actually known, refusing to surrender the 'duelity' that keeps an enemy human rather than 'a dot.' The transcription is badly degraded in the bombing-run stanzas (fragments like 'i i i kets', 'side sockets off gilver speed'), so I read the imagery there provisionally; the title's bitter pun and the closing oath are clear.