The Proportion of War

By Aramis Calderon

We breached homes.

Terrified them.
Intimidated them.
Bagged and tagged them.

Our powerful computers
Reduced them.

For every thousand we bullied 
We got one bad guy
And every wrong target 
Yielded ten new ones. 

Killing people is cheap.
Killing the right person is expensive.

Every dead American cost
An order of magnitude more.

There never was war that
Could be won
With this ratio.

****

Aramis Calderon is a Marine veteran with a pen. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Tampa. His poems and stories have been published in a few places like Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library and The Ernest Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park. His latest published work is Fugitive Son: A Memoir (University of Nebraska Press).