Iwo Jima
More than the citizens of perhaps any other nation, Americans celebrate military service. Every night the CBS Evening News has a segment on “Fallen Heroes;” every Sunday morning, ABC’s George Stephanopoulos’ program closes with “In Memoriam.” This canonization of soldiers is due to the fact that the United States is a military empire. The central idea of empire is the exertion of national power over others who are not part of the nation, the strong over the weak. A recent Paul Krugman column reported that next year the United States’ military expenditures will equal or exceed those of the rest of the world combined. If true, it is evidence of a level of economic, political, and military imperialism never before seen on earth. Since all empires are ultimately dependent on military power to ‘project’ their will on others by lethal force or the threat of it, empires must glorify their armed forces. This is so not only because the empire depends ultimately on the military being able and willing to kill subordinate peoples who resist American hegemony, but also because the military men and women must be willing to be killed to advance the economic and political goals of the empire. These goals are hard to accomplish with volunteer soldiers and even harder with conscripts who normally have no desire to kill or to be killed and who have little or nothing to gain personally from the fruits of empire.
To get imperial conscripts to “do their duty,” conditioning is necessary. First, they must be politically conditioned to believe that the subordinate people’s opposition or resistance to the empire’s will somehow threatens them or their families, “our way of life” or “our freedom.” This conditioning is seen in many guises, in the nightly “Fallen Heroes” blurbs, in the ‘weapons of mass destruction’ fiasco, back to rallying cries about making the world “safe for democracy” in a “war to end all wars” and changing the name of the “War Department” to the “Department of Defense” between 1947 and 1949. America must never be seen as waging a war of aggression, only of defending itself (hence the utility of the Pearl Harbor attack) or (when it serves a political or economic interest) defending the innocent victims of ‘tyranny’ or at least defending ‘freedom’ which as our last President reminded us, our enemies hate and we love. Do our military men believe this? Lance Corporal Hess, USMC, is quoted in The Proud: Inside the Marine Corps, published in 1992:
“I look at it this way. If I do have to kill, I will. And while I’m doing it I’ll be thinking about my family. My mother. And, lookit, do I want some raghead Ay-rab dictating the price of gas she buys or some commie-type hardass coming over here, ruling her, telling her what to do, and you know, exploiting her. It’s for her that you kill. It’s for us.”
He thinks about it again. “Hell yeah, I’ll kill them all. And not just the communists. It’s anybody who’s against the United States. Anybody who wants to say that one man can be a dictatorship and the people don’t have anything to say about it. And he wants to try that on the United States? Well, I’m gonna kill him with all the vigor I have in my body. That’s what it’s all about: preserving our way of life. That’s my job.
These are the words of one successfully conditioned American fighting man, ready to kill for Mom and her experience at the gas pump. And of course, there are politicians perfectly willing to send him off to kill for Mom and millions of folks back home who are perfectly willing to have him kill in their names. Right wing radio and evangelical Christianity regularly fan the flames of bellicosity. As Yeats wrote A Prayer for My Daughter:
For arrogance and hatred are the wares
Peddled in the thoroughfares.
In addition to the general political conditioning of the populace, it is also necessary to individually condition military persons to the idea of maiming and killing other human beings and to grind down their resistance to making themselves vulnerable to being maimed or killed, or, as we euphemistically put it, being put “in harm’s way.” For some, this requires little more than the political conditioning that the whole nation is subjected to. Air Force pilots and crews who flew long-range bombing missions from bases in the U.S. to drop high explosive bombs in Kosovo and then return to base never having seen the results of the bombing didn’t require a lot of extra conditioning. On the other hand, soldiers and Marines who engage in killing and dying that is ‘up close and personal’ require a lot of conditioning, something very much akin to brainwashing.
Our imperial politicians and the mainstream media gloss over the fact that the business of the armed forces is killing and destroying, death and destruction. Every other mission is subordinate. Soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines exist to deploy and employ weapons of destruction, from rifles to hydrogen bombs, or to support those who do. The Marine Rifleman’s Creed is an embarrassingly ‘over the top’ piece of writing, but is also characteristically blunt about the relationship between military people and their weapons:
THIS IS MY RIFLE. There are many like it but this one is mine. My rifle is my best friend. It is my life. I must master it as I master my life. My rifle without me is useless. Without my rifle, I am useless. I must fire my rifle true. I must shoot straighter than any enemy who is trying to kill me. I must shoot him before he shoots me. I will.
My rifle and myself [sic] know that what counts in this war is not the rounds we fire, the noise of our burst, nor the smoke we make. We know that it is the hits that count. We will hit.
My rifle is human, even as I, because it is my life. Thus, I will learn it as a brother. I will learn its weakness, its strength, its parts, its accessories, its sights and its barrel. I will keep my rifle clean and ready, even as I am clean and ready. We will become part of each other. We will.
Before God I swear this creed. My rifle and myself [sic] are the defenders of my country. We are the masters of our enemy. We are the saviors of my life. So be it, until victory is America's and there is no enemy, but Peace
I cringe as I read this “Creed,” knowing that countless Marine ‘boots’ have been forced to commit it to memory and to recite it on command, robot-like. The weapon is personified, the person is weaponized, identified with the killing instrument, turned into a “lean, green, killing machine.”
The Marine Rifleman’s Creed was written by Major General William H. Rupertus not long after the Japanese raid on Pearl Harbor. Rupertus was a career Marine infantry officer, not a grammarian. We can be sure that he did not see the concluding sentence of his creed as a double entendre. Is “Peace” the goal or the enemy? It is not difficult to make the case that for Fortress America, peace is the enemy. Endless war is the goal. Only with endless war can the neocons and other militarists justify the nation’s military budget and all that goes with it, like arguments for the “unaffordibility” of universal health care for our civilian citizens.
The process by which young men are initially conditioned, turned into “lean, green, killing machines,” is the Marine Corps boot camp, in a process that is time-tested and brutal, especially during wartime.
The specific goal of boot camp is to get the recruit to accept and internalize the value that accomplishment of a military mission through the efforts of a highly disciplined, highly skilled, and highly coordinated team is more important than the well-being, or the lives, of the any of the members of the team, including him. The two Great Commandments for Marine leaders (and it is not a mere cliché to say that every Marine is a leader) are: First, accomplish the mission. Second, take care of your men. In that order. The mission of the Marines is death and destruction. Getting each recruit to embrace that mission requires weeks of intense, brutal physical and psychological control and conditioning. By a well thought out program executed by well-trained drill instructors, the recruits are beaten down, dehumanized, frightened, made to feel like “pussies” or “maggots,” incapable of doing anything correctly and unworthy to wear the uniform or to bear the title of “Marine.” The boots are forced to go through grueling endurance tests, painful physical exercises, and extremely intense psychological hazing. For weeks, every day, every hour brings new pain, new pressure, new stress. Individuality is stomped on and punished. Sameness and conformity are inflicted ruthlessly, starting even before the first shearing at the barbershop. Going through the first several weeks of boot camp is like being trapped in an insane asylum or gulag run by sadistic madmen. It is living in controlled terror. It is a dress rehearsal for Hell.
Eventually the ‘boot’ is broken down. All he cares about is getting through the next exercise, the next ordeal, the next hazing, the next hour, the next day without being singled out by his DI. The way he avoids hazing is by becoming robotic or mechanical. He does exactly what he is told to do in exactly the way he is told to do it at exactly the time he is told to do it. He responds precisely and instantaneously to commands in close order drill (forward, march . . . to the rear, march . . . by the left flank, march . .. ) He handles his rifle like a robot (right shoulder, arms. . . port, arms . . . order, arms . . . present, arms . . . inspection, arms . . ..) His ‘rack’ in the barracks is made exactly like every other ‘rack;’ his locker has exactly the same contents laid out in exactly the same way as every other locker in the squad bay. If he deviates in any respect, he is berated in front of every other member of his platoon and the whole platoon may be punished for his transgression. The boot who ‘fucks up’ too often may find himself the guest of honor at a midnight ‘blanket party,’ as portrayed in Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket. Before too long, the recruit’s perfectly normal way of thinking is replaced by perfectly abnormal thinking, which is to say, thinking like a Marine: mission über alles, mission before men, mission before self, death before dishonor. Without that process of breaking down the normal respect for life in men to build up the Marine, political leaders could never count on the Marines to do whatever is necessary, including killing others and sacrificing their own lives, to accomplish their mission, whatever it may be.
Occasionally the brutal treatment crosses the line with tragic and notorious consequences. In 1956, a senior DI took his platoon on a middle of the night march into the swamps around Parris Island. He had them cross Ribbon Creek between Parris Island and Horse Island. The tide came in before he led them back. Seven recruits drowned. In 1975, a recruit, “a fuck-up,” died from beatings inflicted by serial pugil stick opponents. Of course, people get court-martialed for these unintended consequences of harsh training, and official hand-wringing and reforms always follow the deaths, but it is the Marine Corps boot camp culture that makes such fatalities possible. Kubrick did a pretty good job of demonstrating that culture in Full Metal Jacket.
There is much celebration of ‘Marine Corps discipline’ imposed in boot camp. Many who have gone through it speak of “going in as a boy and coming out as a man.” For many years, juvenile and criminal court judges gave some defendants the choice of being sentenced to jail or joining the Marines. Many opted for the Marines and the Marines accepted them. (This practice stopped some years ago.) And in fact there is much truth in the notion that ‘the Marine Corps builds men.’ But there is a dark side to this culture, which I thought of when reading one of Hannah Arendt’s descriptions of Adolph Eichmann in Eichmann in Jerusalem:
So Eichmann’s opportunities for feeling like Pontius Pilate were many, and as the months and the years went by, he lost the need to feel anything at all. This was the way things were, this was the new law of the land, based on the Führer’s order; whatever he did he did, as far as he could see, as a law-abiding citizen. He did his duty, as he told the police and the court over and over again; he not only obeyed orders, he also obeyed the law. Eichmann had a muddled inkling that this could be an important distinction, but neither the defense nor the judges ever took him up on it. The well-worn coins of “superior orders” versus “acts of state” were handed back and forth; they had governed the whole discussion of these matters during the Nuremberg Trials, for no other reason than that they gave the illusion that the altogether unprecedented could be judged according to precedents and the standards that went with them. Eichmann, with his rather modest mental gifts, was certainly the last man in the courtroom to be expected to challenge these notions and to strike out on his own. Since, in addition to performing what he conceived to be the duties of a law-abiding citizen, he had also acted upon orders – always so careful to be “covered” – he became completely muddled, and ended by stressing alternately the virtues and the vices of blind obedience, or the “obedience of corpses,” Kadavergehorsam, as he himself called it.
The famous and infamous General George Patton delivered a speech to his men before the Normandy invasion.
Officers and men of the 65th Infantry Division, rest.
You are now on a winning team. But you have never played. Therefore you must listen carefully to what I have to tell you. . . You think you are disciplined, but you will never know whether or not you are disciplined until you hear a bullet go past. When you hear that bullet go past your ear, you will know whether or not you are disciplined. . . . Now a lot of people don’t know why we have discipline in the Army. They think that discipline is the Army and the Army is discipline, and that’s that. But I’ll tell you why we have discipline in Army. It’s because you must act from habit, and the habit must be stronger the than the fear of death.
That’s Kadavergehorsam, military-style.
On the personal level, one of the lessons learned in boot camp is never to show or acknowledge weakness, sensitivity, hurt or pain or emotion (except of course organized, homicidal, mission-furthering, groupthink rage: “Ready to fight! . . . Ready to kill! . . . Ready to die but never will!”) Most men are reluctant to reveal vulnerability, especially emotional vulnerability. With soldiers and Marines, it’s almost a disgrace, unthinkable. In the same speech I quoted from above, Patton took particular aim at those for whom the conditioning process did not work, for whom acting from habit was not stronger than the fear of death, or of killing others, those who succumbed to combat fatigue:
I want to say a word about those low characters known as ‘psychoneurotics.’ They are sons of bitches, bastards, and lice. In the last war they had ‘shell shock,’ and in the next war they will have some other kind of shock. But every one of them that quits means that more of a burden is thrown on you brave men who continue to fight. So if you have a man who thinks he is a psychoneurotic, make fun of him, kick his ass, and shake him out of it.
Patton’s attitude was common throughout the military and still is. Those who resist killing and fear being killed are considered “sons of bitches, bastards, and lice.” Weakness, sensitivity, vulnerability are disgraceful and dishonorable, unbefitting ‘real men,’ especially of course do-or-die Marines.
My father went through his initiation in early 1944 at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot, San Diego, California. He was not yet 24 years old, but was an old man compared to most of the other recruits. I went through it at age 20 in 1962 at the Training and Test Regiment, Marine Corps, Schools, Quantico, Virginia. His experience was infinitely worse. He was a private, the war was on and Marines were island hopping across the Pacific toward Japan. I was a midshipman and the only war going on was the Cold War. (The Cuban missile crisis occurred a couple of months after I completed boot camp.) I was a college student on a Navy scholarship and an officer candidate; he was a high school drop-out and cannon fodder. The drill instructors tried to get me and the other midshipmen to quit, to stay in the Navy, to become “DORs” – dropped at own request, not good enough for “the Corps”. In 1944, there was no dropping out of a Marine Corps boot camp, except to a Marine Corps brig, a hospital or a mental facility. In Full Metal Jacket the way out was suicide.
The effect of boot camp is shown in the prologue to a book titled “Spare Parts” by Buzz Wiliams:
THE YELLOW FOOTPRINTS CALLED.
They first called as I read that initial letter from my older brother, Lenny, back in June of 1975. I was eight years old, and had lost my only brother, ten years my senior, to something he called "the Corps." It was devastating, but the letters helped, and they came weekly. Each one was a transcript of boot camp life that carved itself deeply into the tablet of my young mind. The first letter described how scared he was, standing on the yellow footprints. I couldn’t believe that my invincible big brother Lenny could be scared of anything.
. . . . . After thirteen weeks and a dozen letters, I would finally be able to see Lenny on the parade deck for his boot camp graduation. Or so I had expected. But that day at Parris Island I saw someone new. He was a stranger capable of pushing his new wife away, robotically reciting a rehearsed phrase about not showing public affection. Everything was different—the way he walked, the way he talked, and especially the look in his eyes.
Spare Parts goes on to give a vivid description of Marine boot camp and life after boot camp in the late 1980s.
My father went from Marine Corps Recruit Depot San Diego to Marine Corps Base, Camp Pendleton, California for infantry training and communications school and more conditioning, physical and psychological. He was assigned to a communications company in the 4th Marine Division and shipped to Hawaii. By November, 1944, the strategists had selected Iwo Jima as the next stepping stone to Japan. (The competing ‘candidate’ for invasion had been the much larger island Formosa, now called Taiwan.) Iwo Jima had two airstrips that allowed the Japanese to harass American bombers on their way from Saipan and Tinian to the Japanese home islands and to warn the home islands of the approach of the bombers. Once captured, those airstrips would deprive Japan of its early warning facility, permit American fighter aircraft to accompany the bombers on their missions and provide emergency landing facilities for damaged aircraft returning from Japan. The 3rd, 4th, and 5th Divisions of the Marines were the invasion forces. The 4th Division conducted training exercises and rehearsals in Maalea Bay on Oahu. Two days after Christmas, the 4th Division Marines started loading onto amphibious support ships for the operation. In mid-January, they conducted another rehearsal in Maalea Bay before steaming to the Mariana Islands and conducting a final rehearsal at Saipan.
My dad lived on his troop ship for almost two months before landing on Iwo Jima. His living space was a canvas cot, his ‘rack,’ a bit longer than 6 feet and about 2½ feet wide with about 2½ feet of vertical space between ‘racks’ stacked six high with a few inches of horizontal space separating adjoining racks. The troop compartments on Navy APAs (‘auxiliary personnel, attack’ ships) are like mausoleums for the living or the pre-dead. There is no personal space other than the assigned ‘rack.’ Depending on which troop compartment you are assigned to, there could be 75 to more than 100 Marines crammed into a windowless space below the main deck, about 35 feet square. During the day, the racks are “triced up” (folded up to the vertical) to make room for the vertical Marines in the compartment. With the racks triced up, there is nothing to do but play cards, complain, clean your weapon, write home, wait for meals in the galley, wait for your unit’s turn to go topside for fresh air and some exercise, and think about what awaits you at your destination, whether you will be killed or wounded, whether your friends will be killed or wounded, whether you will be brave and perform well or be scared shitless. You wonder whether you will ever see your home and family again.
I know a little of what life is like as a Marine on a troop ship because I spent two miserable days and one miserable night aboard one. My Dad spent almost two months. I know a little of what an amphibious assault is like because I took part in an amphibious exercise during my boot camp in the summer of 1962. In my case, however, unlike his, there were no defending artillery, rocket, mortar and machine gun rounds aimed at me and no mines in the approach lanes to the landing beach. There were no projectiles from 8 inch guns on cruisers or 16 inch guns on battleships. Above all, there were no corpses or body parts on the landing beach or in the surf. I know something of the anxiety from climbing down the cargo nets into the landing craft, loaded with combat gear, of the fear of slipping and falling, the fear of not timing the letting go of the net just right as the landing craft rose and fell like a bobber with the heaving of the ocean against the hull of the ship. I know something of the fear that another Marine or his steel helmet or his rifle would crash onto me once I was in the landing craft. I know that falling into the water could mean drowning or being crushed between the landing craft and the hull of the ship. I know a little of how alone one can feel even as one of 36 combat-equipped men crammed “asshole to bellybutton” into a space so tight no one could turn around. I know more than a little of the seasickness that comes so readily as the flat bottomed boat rolls and pitches and yaws during the long circling as all the boats were loaded and assembled and readied for moving on line to the beach. I know the challenge of vomiting over the high gunwale to avoid vomiting on the Marines around you, or being vomited on. What I do not know and my father did know was the fear of being killed at any moment, of your friends being killed, and the imminence of needing to kill other human beings.
My father landed on Iwo Jima on D Day, February 19, 1945 and left 27 days later, on March 17th. Those 27 days changed his life. I cannot hope to describe his experiences during that month. He has never described them for me and I doubt that he could even if he wanted to. There are many books about the battle but, but like most such books, they tend to be full of descriptions of topography and of troop movements (progress on D Day, D+1,, etc.) and of logistics and statistics (70,000 Marines, 22,000 Japanese, 800 ships, 3 days of naval bombardment, etc.) James Bradley’s book Flags of our Fathers is better than most insofar as he focuses on the lives and experiences of the individual men, including his father, who raised the flag on Mount Suribachi.
There are also a couple of movies that purport to be about the battle, most notably John Wayne’s Sands of Iwo Jimabut movies can never reproduce reality and Sands of Iwo Jima didn’t even come close. I was 8 years old when it was released and I saw it with my cousins at the Cosmo Theater at 79th and Halsted, but there was no discussion of it or of the battle (or probably of anything else) with my father when I came home.
William Manchester, himself a World War II Marine, wrote a memoir, Goodbye Darkness, in which he described the landing beach on Iwo Jima:
It resembled Doré’s illustrations of Inferno. Essential cargo – ammo, rations, water – was piled up in sprawling chaos. And gore, flesh, and bones were lying all about. The deaths on Iwo were extraordinarily violent. There seemed to be no clean wounds, just fragments of corpses. It reminded one battalion medical officer of a Bellevue dissecting room. Often the only way to distinguish between Japanese and Marine dead was by the legs; Marines wore canvas leggings and Nips khaki puttees. Otherwise identification was completely impossible. You tripped over strings of viscera fifteen feet long, over bodies which had been cut in half at the waist. Legs and arms, and heads bearing only necks, lay fifty feet from the closest torsos. As night fell the beachhead reeked with the stench of burning flesh.
My father told me more than once that he and the other Marines on the island did not fear getting hit by a bullet; they were afraid of being blown apart by high explosive weapons, artillery or mortar rounds or rockets. The opening scenes of Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan is probably the best cinematic attempt at portraying the slaughterhouse character of a contested amphibious landing. Like all war movies, however, it falls far short of conveying the horror of the killing fields.
What the folks back home were shown by the War Department was Joe Rosenthal’s photograph of the flag raising on Mount Suribachi. What they were not shown was the death and carnage that were part of the daily life on Iwo Jima from D-Day until the island was secured. The photos below show some of that reality.
The corpses of dead Marines on Iwo Jima being sprayed with disinfectant by a member of the Graves Registration Unit as the bodies awaited burial. The bodies are covered by the Marines’ ponchos which served as their shrouds. The dead were buried in trenches 8 feet deep, 30 feet long – “three feet from center line of body to center line of body, fifty bodies to a row, three feet between rows.” Joe Rosenthal’s photograph of the flag raising on Mount Suribachi was and is an enduring symbol of American triumphalism. This photo by Marine combat photographer Arthur J. Kiely, Jr. shows the cost of the triumphs.
The photo on the left, also by Arthur Kiely, shows members of a Graves Registration team identifying bodies before burial. If the body was largely intact, identification could be made by ‘dog tags,’ names stenciled on uniforms or written on underwear. Serial numbers on rifles, like the M1’s piled near the dead, could be matched up with the Marines whose weapon they were. Bodies that were blown apart or badly burned might never be identified. The mortuary scene in the photo on the left is down the beach from my father’s JASCO unit. I first found these photographs in a history of the battle of Iwo Jima, but later found a copy among old family photographs at Aunt Kitty’s house.
Your grandfather spent 27 days on the landing beach as a member of the 4th Division’s Shore Party, specifically, a member of the 1st Joint Assault Signal Company, the “JASCO.” His MOS or military occupational specialty was communications and the JASCO was the central nervous system for the Division, responsible for communications between commanders and their units and from unit to unit. “Walkie-talkies,” field radios, and wire-linked telephone lines were used to facilitate the landing and movement of waterborne troops, equipment, and supplies and the evacuation of the seriously wounded. These casualties were taken off the island by the same kind of landing craft that had brought them to the island, and taken either to an aircraft carrier for further transport by air to Guam, or to one of several hospital ships which operated around the clock during and after the battle. Within the first month of the fighting on Iwo Jima, 13,737 wounded Marines and corpsmen were evacuated by hospital ship, another 2,449 by airlift. Another 2,648 were classified as suffering from “combat fatigue.” (These were some of the men General Patton called “low characters, sons of bitches, bastards, and lice,” the ones he encouraged his troops to “make fun of him, kick his ass, and shake him out of it.”)
Your grandfather was nominated by his commanding officer for a Bronze Star for his work in evacuating his sergeant from the communication post on the beach to the aid station. The sergeant had cracked up from the shelling and the carnage. My father never received the award, probably for two related reasons. First, the Marines are notoriously stingy about giving out awards. They mock the other branches of the military for giving awards promiscuously. (Twenty-one years later, I was nominated for a Bronze Star for work in Operation Double Eagle in Vietnam. Following family tradition, mine didn’t come through either.) Second, this stinginess notwithstanding, an enormous number of medals were given in connection with service on Iwo Jima because, as Admiral Chester Nimitz said after the battle, “uncommon valor was a common virtue.” With so many Medals of Honor, Silver Stars, and Navy Crosses awarded, it was easy to treat Bronze Star nominations as small potatoes.
I learned of the Bronze Star nomination about five years ago and pretty much by chance. My father and I were having one of our infrequent, always short conversations about World War II, the Marines and Iwo over his kitchen table in Florida when he mentioned it, off-handedly, matter-of-factly, with no pride or suggestion of importance about it. As soon as I heard of it, however, I associated this fact with his lifetime of nightmares. One of the paragraphs of Flags of Our Fathers struck home:
For many of the veterans, their memories of combat receded; supplanted by happy peacetime experiences. But there were others from whom the memories did not die, but were somehow contained. And for a few, the memories were howling demons that ruled their nights.
Among these last, a disproportionate number, I believe, are corpsmen.
It was the corpsmen, after all, who saw the worst of the worst. A Marine rifleman might see his buddy shot down beside him, and regret the loss for the rest of his life. But in the moment, he kept going. That was his training, his mission.
But the corpsmen saw only the results. His entire mission on Iwo was to hop from blown face to severed arm, doing what he could under heavy fire to minimize the damage, stanch the flow, ease the agony.
The corpsmen remembered. And their memories ruled the night.
. . .
All combat produces unshakable memories. But consider Cliff Langley, who as Corpsman Langley labored side by side with my father on Iwo – 3rd Platoon, Easy Company.
He went on to serve in Korea and Vietnam with the Army. But there’s one battle that rules: “The dreams have lasted for years. At seventy-three I still get ‘em. I’ve been in three wars and I haven’t got past Iwo yet.”
The same was true of your grandfather. Until the time of his death, he “hadn’t got past Iwo yet.”
When you’re alone in the middle of the night and you
wake in a sweat and a hell of a fright
When you’re alone in the middle of the bed and you
wake like someone hit you in the head
You’ve had a cream of a nightmare dream and you’ve
got the hoo-ha’s coming to you.
Hoo hoo hoo
You dreamt you waked up at seven o’clock and it’s foggy
and it’s damp and it’s dawn and it’s dark
And you wait for a knock and the turning of a lock for
you know the hangman’s waiting for you.
And perhaps you’re alive
And perhaps you’re dead
Hoo ha ha
Hoo ha ha
HOO
HOO
HOO
Knock Knock Knock
Knock Knock Knock
Knock
Knock
Knock
From Sweeny Agonistes
T. S. Eliot
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