Heptman, the commander, once said that the best soldiers are the poets, because only poets can fight and die for an ideal. God knows where he picked that one up. Mishima Yukio or, more probably, an American bestseller. At any rate, leaving aside the problem of 'the ideal', he said nothing about the fanatics – rather than poets – who fight and die for an ideal. And if being a good soldier means killing your enemy efficiently and in great numbers, then there are plenty of good soldiers who are arguably not poets nor even fanatics. To begin with, you have the blockheads who can do plenty of damage, e.g. those who eventually won the war by shooting cruise missiles from two hundred miles away or dropping cluster bombs from the latest type of aircraft. It's hard to think of them as poets. Another category can be variously described as born killers, congenital predators, psychopaths. Faro and I took to calling them 'the happy butchers'. Before the war the happy butchers often lived unnoticed as obscure non-commissioned officers, unremarkable citizens doing ordinary jobs, their talent for killing hidden, latent, sublimated perhaps. The war brought them to the fore. When the killing season started, out they came from their nooks and crannies to reveal their boundless energy and enthusiasm for the task at hand – not only professional soldiers, but also bartenders, engineers, factory workers, accountants…you name it. And the happiest butchers, the rottenest apples of the bunch, spread such horror and violence around them that the horror and the violence became contagious, so that, in the end, even some of the poets became butchers.
