My hope on this centenary of 1916 is that the poems in my collection Peacekeeper bring a new and enlightening perspective on the Irish peacekeeping experience to the Irish people, to the families of Irish peacekeepers who have served abroad on these missions for the last six decades and to the wider community. They come through me but they are the story of many.
This type of literary narrative about the military experience hasn’t really been attempted before in the Irish context. Peacekeeper is the first of its kind to address in some little way the modern Irish citizen-soldier, sailor, airman and woman in his/her role and experiences in foreign conflict zones on behalf of the Irish people on UN service. Peacekeeper is the first collection of war poems to be published in Ireland by an Irish soldier, certainly since the end of the second World War and this is why I was and probably still am a little apprehensive as the poems find their way.
These poems were inspired by and remember some of the long dark days and cold nights in the Middle East and the Balkans, not just mine but those of the ordinary peacekeeper in general . I, like every other peacekeeper, was not at war on behalf of my country but operated in places where war was constantly occurring and many, many had to fight on more than one occasion.
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There have been casualties, tears, disappointments, anger, fear and despair experienced by Irish citizens on peace support missions and also for those they sought to assist, to protect those in the local populations who were at the centre of those conflicts really – the refugees, the injured and dispossessed. Peacekeepers become witness in a way and these poems try to show you what they saw and still see.
I wasn’t married when I went to Lebanon and I had a young family when I was in Kosovo but every time I went away I had family waiting and worrying and every day I saw them in the people I came into contact with.
My tours of active service duty brought me to South Lebanon with the Unifil peacekeeping forces in the early 1990s and to Kosovo with Kfor in 2000 and although I didn’t realise it then my being a historian and writer later on would force me to become aware of the historical narrative of Ireland’s foreign policy as it affected the Irish Defence Forces and the committing of troops to the Congo in 1960, through to Cyprus, South America, Asia, the Balkans on the breakup of the former Yugoslavia, East Timor and many, many other countries and conflicts around the globe over the last 56 years.
My peacekeeping service is but a nanosecond of experience in the long story of Irish soldiers operating on this country’s foreign policy with regard to the UN and other agencies. My tours might pale into insignificance for some but to me and to those who repeatedly left the shores of this country to serve the international community as peacekeepers in an increasingly strange and volatile world, those seconds are weighted heavy with significance, memories and consequence and many are filled with hurt. I came home safely from my tours of peacekeeping duty but 89 others did not, many have returned with the legacies of their service within and on their bodies. I hope that what I and we did means something.
I still feel feeble sometimes in my attempt at writing about these things. I admire the war poets like Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen and more recently Brian Turner who writes about his time in Iraq; even our own Francis Ledwidge who was killed during the first World War stands out but I am not like them exactly. Though they showed me that I could write my poems I am bringing them out from the peacekeeping experience.
So Peacekeeper is my offering, a beginning, I hope, for a new narrative on this aspect of Irish society and a cultural identity of sorts but I choose to do it this time through poetry. The collection is divided into two parts – the first contains poems about the experience of living, seeing and witnessing Lebanon as an Irish peacekeeper, the first of whom arrived in 1978 and remain there still; the Early Bird mine sweeps, the compounds, Hill 880, the shell warnings, impacting tank and artillery rounds, explosions, bunkers, tracer, the violence at any moment in that magnificent landscape, the people caught up in a long war between the Amal & Hezbollah and the DFF and Isrealis, Operation Accountability, Operation Grapes of Wrath and the hundreds of dead at Qana. That conflicted history that still haunts me today and that peacekeeper’s self-examination. Lebanon was that beautiful, distorted landscape and with every step I took in that country I could feel deep time and history pull on my soul – I still do.
The second part contains poems about Kosovo and the wars that erupted in the Balkans in the 1990s. In Kosovo our little Transport Company of 110 soldiers was part of a force of 45,000. We alone were tasked as a theatre asset and assisted in the first free elections ever held in that country. The greater tasks were the humanitarian ones, to help the local people rebuild their homes and lives post-conflict and also among other things working with the International Crimes Tribunal Former Yugoslavia to transport and return the remains of the victims of ethnic cleansing from mass graves and others who had and continued to succumb to the violence.
I saw all that I witnessed, I just didn’t realise I was absorbing it and though it was hard and sometimes it is still difficult to reconcile to the world I lived in I hope at the end of my days to be able to say this was one of the good things I did with my life.
Distant Whisper
Do you remember
how drops of water
trickle down stone walls
in the wadiis of south Lebanon,
as they have for a thousand years,
over contours, between grooves,
slowing on rough rendering?
How it reminded you of the west of Ireland,
white lines on her hills?
Do you remember
liquid moving like a teardrop,
trickling in a whisper of life,
the hum of a bee, or an insect
living in its own significance,
going about its business
as time stands still
long enough for you to study
the erosion of war,
knowing that a belt of Point Five ammunition
fired at you could turn this feature to rubble
in an instant?
Do you remember thinking
if you die here today - behind this old wall,
trickles will go on forming slow grooves
and you will be that distant whisper?
Deliverance
(Lebanon)
In the orphanage a child
cowers from cursing men outside.
She wants to climb back into
her dead mother's womb
and hide inside its warm, soft,
un-edged safety,
where no explanation is needed
or reason to hide under splintered
staircases or run the gauntlet to basement
bomb shelters, existing minute to minute
with strangers until the dawn arrives with her
deliverance and she refuses to be born.
Broken Spade
(Kosovo)
You lay in your frozen field, slack-jawed at how you
came to be there, your mouth caked in last year's mud,
limbs twisted about your body as if in the midst of some
remembered dance or tempered at your rotting crops,
bent over in disgust, yielding in the half light and startled
at the cold - they have never felt.
This harvest, un-reaped and yet reaped upon you
hides the stale shoe and crushed spectacles,
the broken spade that hastily covered you in the soft
clay you loved, now steeled hard against the sharp sky.
I imagine the fears of your kin as they searched the high
golden horizon that summer day.
They might have felt the distant calamity that took you
following the bullet casings along the beaten track,
and I wonder if they found you,
then I see the scars of cluster bombs and scorched
stalks of your petrified labours and there, there in the shrapnel
of this bitter harvest I behold your seed,
torn apart but reaching out to the one who bore them.
Michael J Whelan is caretaker of the Military Aviation Collection at Baldonnel. He holds an MA in modern history from NUI Maynooth. His poems have won second place in the Patrick Kavanagh and 3rd in the Jonathan Swift Awards. Peacekeeper was published in 2016 by Doire Press and from good bookshops at €12. michaeljwhelan.wordpress.com
