"Military Mind"

Since I love poetry, I decided to analyze yet another one. This time the lucky winner was a poem called “Military Mind” by Charlie Smith, a highly accomplished American poet(Poetry foundation). I actually stumbled upon this poem by accident, and it reminds me of Jarhead, a book by Anthony Swofford as an account of his own life and the horrors of his war experience. Like Swofford has in Jarhead, the speaker in this poem has had a severe case of “military mind.” So I am happy to have found this poem, and I think from reading what I have in Jarhead I am able to better understand the meaning of this poem. This poem has a journal style, that at first may seem like just that: a proud soldier who reminisces on days past in some branch of the military. However if you look deeper, you will find that that is actually far from the case.
For the duration of the first third of the poem, the speaker seems to praise the glorious aspects of the military. These things were living the experience of military school and learn to march, or attain some level of balance, belong to a group. He wanted to be an expert at fighting, learn the skills of combat, but the words the speaker chose tell me that he did not actually want to fight. He believed that doing all of these things would earn him some degree of respect from society. He wanted trust from his fellow soldiers, and in turn he wanted to be trusted. He wanted a family of brothers on and off of the battlefield(lines 1-6). All of these are what he thought he would experience upon entering. I relate this to Swofford in Jarhead because he had the same feelings toward the military when he joined. He believed he would make friends, that the people he would be spending weeks, months, even years with would always be there when he was in need. He found that life in the barracks was not all he thought it would be. He could trust no one. He could not count on depending on people. He had to trust only himself
A strange thing begins to take place from the seventh line and onto the end of the work. The tone has changed from immaculate to bloodstained. The speaker is now matured, and he has some sense of what this military life is about. He describes his quick, unwanted shift into maturity, the “hairy arms” in line 7 and the “corded muscles” in line 8. His body has changed; and thanks to this description the reader can now see that the speaker was not muscular prior to these days. Not only was he not muscular, but the transformation also seems unnatural. The speaker could possibly still be young, yet he has been forced to enter into manhood in such a small amount of time.
As the poem stretches on, the speaker becomes more aware of the realities of the military, which includes fighting and killing. These are aspects a naïve person would not realize, but as the speaker progresses through it, he becomes more aware of the truth. These words begin to transcend into memories. Things like the smell of gunpowder, and the bloody boots smudged with dirt; the faces of his dead friends as they died one by one, the actual realization of what war really is, and the horrible effects it really has on you and those who love you(lines 11-16). These images and smells are not just things you can experience without actually experiencing them.
At the end of the poem, I can see what true message the speaker was trying to relay. The speaker started at the beginning, with his expectations as a youth. When he entered the military, he arrived with a mindset that was quickly erased. He matured too quickly, and was faced with the horrors of battle, killing, and watching those he cared for die. Almost meeting death himself. Long after the war had passed he realizes that in the beginning, he was trapped in this frame of mind. All of the sugarcoated dreams he had about the military were just dreams. The real experience is life altering. And once you cross that line, there is no returning to the safety of the past.