Note: Marching Men was written by Martin Harris as a response to the sight of the coffins of British servicemen returning to this country from Afghanistan. My intention was to draw parallels between military operations using the poppy which is grown extensively for opium and ironically is also the symbol we use for Remembrance Day. This poem concerns the current operations in Helmand province, Afghanistan. Try and study our eyes, and I’ll bet that you can’t.īehind them lie horrors that you’ll never see,Īnd the reason you won’t is the soldier like me. So next time you start, with your rights to rant, Whilst some of us have only been alive eighteen years. We’ve seen many things that would bring you to tears Who stand up against evil, in front of hells guns. Your own rights of freedom are paid by us scum, To call a working class soldier scum, makes me more than irate. To beat on your women, to rape young boys after tea,Īre no things that any almighty can wish to be.įor a middle class student, from here or a foreign state, He knows he’s no true Muslim and Allah knows this as well. When an Islamist shouts about the Infidel, When an infant is beaten for crying so long.ĭoes it make us lads evil for ending these crimes?įor leaving our own children to give those people our time? When a woman is hanged, for humming a song, Well let me just ask you, as you stand and you shout, The same ground which you walk on when you shout and you scream,Ībout murder and invasion in the pay of the Queen. Nah just young lads in the Army, there are plenty around,īut these two now heroes, for they rest in the ground. It says they were different, perhaps two of a kind? The uniform they wore, like a statement of our time. Or to protect the defenceless and to come back a man. Well why did they go there, for the glory? The tan? They both died for each other whether you knew it or not. Two more proud mothers, their grief intertwined. Two union jacks and the streets neatly lined, One of the protesters couldn't speak English and I was moved by both anger and sorrow to write this, and I wish every one of those protestors would read it.”Īs two more pine coffins carry two more brave dead, “I wrote this a month after the death of my friend Cpl Johnathan "Woody" Woodgate, when I encountered some protesters shouting abuse outside an Army recruitment office. James Clark, is a Trooper of the Household Cavalry. Your friend, his warmth, his love, his touch, will wait for you in another life Sometime love is there, you can see it, taste it, hear it, laugh with it.sometimes war comes between you and love, sometimes war takes away that chance.ĭeath awakens him with every sleeping breath I understand now this is winter….this is my winterĬhris's introduction to A Soldier's Lost Love I never have felt this way before, cold, weak and exposed, I close my eyes and try to think of home. This must be the first signs of a new winter?Ĭan I reach upward to touch the falling flake? Is this real, or just a fleeting moment of life, of my life Nothing about war is peaceful nothing about dying is graceful.but maybe in those last seconds, that last breath, that last blink.peace finds you. I am currently out in Afghanistan, and watch daily as soldiers from all nations are taken on their final journey from Kandahar Airbase home to rest. A Soldier’s Winter Author's introduction to A Soldier's Winter I am proud to have served our brave service men and women in Afghanistan in my own small way. Seeing all those helicopters coming in with the dead and wounded moved me greatly and put my own small problems into perspective. At the time I was working in Camp Bastion in Afghanistan, for the NAAFI and was wallowing in self pity as my partner had just sent me a “Dear John” e mail. Phil Williams explains how this poem came to be written: I would write them down, construct them into poems and somehow I felt better for getting it off my chest."Įach playing our part in this brutal game Under the stars in the desert, rhymes would manifest in my head. He explains, "During my fourteen months in Afghanistan, I had many feelings and thoughts that I was unable to share with anyone. He was a Royal Marines Commando from 2005-2009 and served on Operation Herrick five and seven in Helmand province for a total of fourteen months.