Summary Of Old Soldiers Never Die They Just Decade Away By Brian Turner

Old Soldiers Never Die, They Just Fade Away Brian Turner’s poem “Jundee Ameriki” utilizes visual imagery and an acquiescent empathetic tone to demonstrate how a soldier’s wounds exist both internally and externally. While a doctor operates on a soldier, the speaker expresses the visual image of “open[ing] a thin layer of skin” to allow the reader to understand how gruesome and deep the physical pains are for the surgeon’s patient (2). Additionally, the speaker’s description of this operation as “a kind of weeping the body does” points toward how the speaker views the soldier’s wretched circumstances with understanding (4). However, the psychological pain takes numerous years to recover from just as the doctor removes “slivers of shrapnel” from the soldier’s body—

When the doctor sees all the shrapnel and debris, a story arises from the soldier’s scars (8-9). The speaker affirms that these physical scars did not come about on their own; another person caused them while the soldier was touring in the Middle East. To better describe the scene of the attack on the soldier, the speaker employs an image of the soldier’s female attacker yelling with her “roughened larynx” right before attacking him to incite a chilling response from the reader (12-13). This woman, who is clearly trying to kill the American soldier, gives the soldier a “dark and lasting gift” of physical and mental suffering that causes the soldier to undergo this operation several years later (16). Indeed, the physical scars embedded in the soldier’s skin cab regale this story with the fragments of the woman’s attack (17-18). While the physical scars are healing and progressing, the psychological horror from that day will likely haunt the soldier to this day, especially since soldiers do not often receive proper spiritual or emotional care after the war. Though the speaker recognizes the pain of the soldier, he realizes that “the body must learn to absorb”