Page 80
By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
War, money, and technology merge into a grotesque spectacle where killing is sold as disciplined modern achievement.
Vietnam, the Pentagon, wallets, hired brains, the Middle East, and cockpit instrumentation all collapse into one machinery of profit and destruction. The language keeps turning military action into commercial display and technical ritual, so guilt is pushed downward while the pilot chases individualized victory. Its density is aggressive, but the direction is clear: organized power has made murder sleek, global, and absurd.
'ALL / FOR / COUNT DOWN KILL': 'The Vietnam War is done none too soon / as the Pentagon limousine arrives at the showroom / of GO***GO cigar girls and cocktails', a 'Well disciplined new Kipling Cadet' pilot 'craves the computer / of individualized victory', and guilt's explosions float below 'On the glaze of a Captain's eyes'.
The poem refuses any elegiac register for Vietnam's end and pivots straight into the next war economy: the Pentagon limo pulls up to a 'showroom' of go-go girls, business and slaughter sharing one lobby. Killing is sold as disciplined modern achievement, the cockpit a place of 'technological mass mind superiority' where 'mission must finger button push'. 'Training ground creations / from Colorado to the Sahara' maps the geography of coming missions before this war has cooled. The pilot who 'craves the computer / of individualized victory' is the line that dates the poem toward a drone logic of remote, exonerated killing - 'About exoneration with scientific exorcism; / the explosions of guilt below'. The dense, escalating syntax makes murder feel sleek, global, and absurd. Source spellings 'mammouth', 'missle', 'metalic', 'inacts' are preserved as written.