A soldier who helped to shoot a looter and cannot stop seeing him, on patrol and at home.
How soldiers' accounts of modern wars and post-traumatic stress shape the poem, and how its spoken voice, repetition and turning point work.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'On another occasion, we got sent out', 'probably armed, possibly not', 'I see every round as it rips through his life', 'pain itself, the image of agony', 'tosses his guts back into his body', 'End of story, except not really', 'His blood-shadow stays on the street', 'the drink and the drugs won’t flush him out', 'he’s here in my head when I close my eyes, / dug in behind enemy lines', 'his bloody life in my bloody hands'.
Form: a dramatic monologue in a soldier's spoken voice, in seven four-line stanzas and a final couplet; the casual opening; the turn at 'End of story, except not really', from the event to the memory; and the echo of 'probably armed, possibly not' when he sleeps.
Context: Armitage's The Not Dead (2008), poems based on the accounts of veterans of the Gulf, Bosnia and Malayan wars and first heard in a Channel 4 film; post-traumatic stress disorder and its flashbacks; Armitage, Poet Laureate since 2019.
Compares well with: Disabled on what war leaves a soldier with; War Photographer on images that will not go away; Kamikaze on a soldier living with his choice; Decomposition on guilt.
