Poem ?Losses? Essay, Research Paper

?It was not dying: everybody died.

It was not dying: we had hied before

In the routine crashes-and our fields

Called up the papers, wrote home to our folks,

And the rates rose, all because of us.?

When people died in war it didn?t impact the majority of the people in the United States, they would just contact the papers or whoever sent the letters to there family and went on fighting the war.

?We died on the wrong page of the almanac,

Scattered on mountains fifty miles away;

Diving on haystacks, fighting with a friend,

We blazed up on the lines we never saw.?

When Randall referred to people dying on the wrong page of the almanac, this just meant that when people died they were marked down as a casualty of war and not of natural death.

Scattered allover the land fitting with a friend or maybe someone they have just met and never saw before. The line they never saw before is the line between them and whom they were fighting. They couldn?t see this line but they new it was there and what was needed to be done to cross this line.

The soldiers were not that old, at one point Randall says,? We died like aunts or pets or foreigners. (When we left high school nothing else had died for us to figure we had died like.)? This describes how they hadn?t really experienced death like they did when they went to war.

?In our new planes, with our new crews; we bombed

The ranges by the desert or the shore,

Fired at towed targets, waited for our scores_

And turned into replacements and woke up

One morning, over England, operational?.

The soldiers would fight with new people and new equipment, because they were all replacements for the ones who died. They would bomb places and shoot things up and when they were shot up they would be replaced with no problem, by new people and new things.

?It was not an accident but a mistake

(But an easy one for anyone to make).?

The soldiers died because of mistakes by the Government, not by accidents by there own decisions in war.

? We read or mail and counted up our missions-

In bombers named for girls, we burned

The cities named for girls, we burned

The cities we had learned about in school-

Till our lives wore out: our bodies lay among

The people we had killed and never saw.?

One of the most important things for many soldiers in war was to read the mail from there families. Letters from loved ones helped keep their minds off hard times and the entire killing.

They would fly around and go places they would learn about in school, not top visit, but to bomb and destroy them. When it was all done they would find people they have never seen before dead, and when they lived threw the hell of war, the Government would give them a metal and say ?Our casualties were low.? The casualties may have been low compared to our enemy, but for families, who had loved ones die in war, the casualties were real high.

Bibliography

Junior in high school about a B average