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On the last Sunday in June, Lt. Kylan Jones-Huffman, a Navy reservist
stationed in Bahrain, e-mailed a poem to members of his online haiku group. He
said he dedicated the poem to his friend Marianne, "whose good friend was
killed this past week, somewhere south of Baghdad."
late night call -
the remains will arrive
on Thursday
the weather here
not much different from Iraq
Jones-Huffman might not have known the soldier who'd been killed, but "I'm sure I passed over the report in the daily summary," he wrote. "It would have read something like this: '16 significant actions, 6 initiated by coalition forces seeking contact; 1 US KIA, 8 US WIA, 2 Iraqi KIA, 4 Iraqi WIA, 27 detainees.' But they all blur together, and I am not reminded often enough that each of those numbers is its own tragedy."
It's hard to say which is more haunting now, the poem or the prose that followed it. What is certain is that Jones-Huffman's life ended in tragedy, too. On Aug. 21, the 31-year-old U.S. Naval Academy graduate and College Park resident was shot and killed by an unidentified gunman while riding in a vehicle in a town south of Baghdad.
Last week, in the midst of preparations for a private memorial service, Jones-Huffman's brother, Niko Huffman, said the grieving family did not wish to speak to the press about Kylan. And yet in his poems and other writings - composed in the final months of his life and made public after his death - Kylan Jones-Huffman speaks for himself. His eloquent, honest reflections on the war and its aftermath are both a rare glimpse at the conflict through the eyes of one who was there and a harrowing reminder of what the world has lost: a serviceman with a scholar's mind and a poet's soul, a student of history and languages who yearned to play a productive role in rebuilding Iraq even as he struggled to make sense of the operation that sent him there.
"Now that we've gotten into this mess, we have to make it work, and not just for the sake of the Iraqis," Jones-Huffman wrote in a July 4 e-mail to Juan Cole, a history professor at the University of Michigan with whom he'd corresponded frequently in recent months. "Whatever arises in Iraq had better be worth the deaths it will take to get there ..."
The professor had never met Jones-Huffman in person. Neither had many of the poets in the online haiku group. These people knew the man only from his writing; the depth of their grief is a testament to the power of his words.
gaunt children
selling old bayonets -
noonday sun
summer solstice -
women in black abayas
wade in the sea
twelve hour watch:
the morning threat report
late night call -
the remains will arrive
on Thursday
the weather here
not much different from Iraq
Jones-Huffman might not have known the soldier who'd been killed, but "I'm sure I passed over the report in the daily summary," he wrote. "It would have read something like this: '16 significant actions, 6 initiated by coalition forces seeking contact; 1 US KIA, 8 US WIA, 2 Iraqi KIA, 4 Iraqi WIA, 27 detainees.' But they all blur together, and I am not reminded often enough that each of those numbers is its own tragedy."
It's hard to say which is more haunting now, the poem or the prose that followed it. What is certain is that Jones-Huffman's life ended in tragedy, too. On Aug. 21, the 31-year-old U.S. Naval Academy graduate and College Park resident was shot and killed by an unidentified gunman while riding in a vehicle in a town south of Baghdad.
Last week, in the midst of preparations for a private memorial service, Jones-Huffman's brother, Niko Huffman, said the grieving family did not wish to speak to the press about Kylan. And yet in his poems and other writings - composed in the final months of his life and made public after his death - Kylan Jones-Huffman speaks for himself. His eloquent, honest reflections on the war and its aftermath are both a rare glimpse at the conflict through the eyes of one who was there and a harrowing reminder of what the world has lost: a serviceman with a scholar's mind and a poet's soul, a student of history and languages who yearned to play a productive role in rebuilding Iraq even as he struggled to make sense of the operation that sent him there.
"Now that we've gotten into this mess, we have to make it work, and not just for the sake of the Iraqis," Jones-Huffman wrote in a July 4 e-mail to Juan Cole, a history professor at the University of Michigan with whom he'd corresponded frequently in recent months. "Whatever arises in Iraq had better be worth the deaths it will take to get there ..."
The professor had never met Jones-Huffman in person. Neither had many of the poets in the online haiku group. These people knew the man only from his writing; the depth of their grief is a testament to the power of his words.
gaunt children
selling old bayonets -
noonday sun
summer solstice -
women in black abayas
wade in the sea
twelve hour watch:
the morning threat report
