Four-Letter Word

Hugh Martin, the author of Stick Soliders has a very uinique style of writing, The two poems that I really liked was Four-Letter Word and The Summer of Crawling. In Four-Letter Word especially on page 40 he describes accurately what probably every solider goes through, the many ways in which people tell others when  someone is leaving to go to war " He's leaving for Iraq...his unit is being mobilized for Iraq...he has to go to Iraq." He also shows some emotions in this poem when he talks about  how he went from house to house and drank....yet after that night he knew he was still going to Iraq. In The Summer of Crawling I got a sense for how their training was, and in essence what they were getting themselves into...when he speaks about how Barnes said "All of you will go ...half of you will come back horizontally." He really was not sugar coating things for them men he was training, because in essence all the soliders that are "going to war" go, but not all of them return the way they left, whether they are injured or even if they are killed. They were training to "kill Hussein" and since "Saddam Hussein wants them deas" they had to be in top notch shape as a unit in order to defeat him...it's almost as if their Drill Sergeant was saying they were the only ones going to war, even though they knew other soliders were going too. I just like how Martin writes so calmly, and makes you think about what he's writing.