Poetry / Kathryn Nuernberger
:: The Passive Voice ::
Operation Big Buzz, 1955: 30,000 mosquitoes were dispersed into Carver Village, a predominantly Black neighborhood in Savannah. The U. S. Army Chemical Corps wanted to know the feasibility of using mosquitoes as a yellow fever vector. Operation May Day, 1956: Experiment repeated with releases at ground level and a plan to recover the mosquitoes using trays treated with dry ice. Operation Drop Kick, 1956: More of the same. In 1958 mosquitoes were released in the Black community of Avon Park, Florida. From the data gathered there, it was concluded the cost of attacking a 7.5 km area with infected mosquitoes would be $25,666. An attack on a city the size of Washington D.C. (which is to say a city the size of Hanoi, Riyadh, Beirut, or Ahmedabad) would be $179,232. “It has been estimated that between 50-90 percent of a nonimmune population bitten by infected yellow fever mosquitoes will become infected and 30-40 percent of victims will die. Thus 50% of the personnel in a battalion would likely become incapacitated and a large number would die.” Who did this estimating? William H. Rose, Operations Research Analyst, GS-1515-13, Job No 1539, is the author of “An Evaluation of Entomological Warfare as a Potential Danger to the United States and European NATO Allies” (March 1981, ROTE Project No. 1L162706A553-TA3-7). According to William H. Rose’s 2003 obituary, “Our beloved husband, father, grandfather, and uncle” was employed at Dugway Proving Grounds as a microbiologist for 26 years. After his retirement, he became involved in Big Brothers Big Sisters of Utah and received the 1998 Big Brother of the Year award. He was an active member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, held many church positions, and spent most of his retirement years serving in something called the name extraction program, which uses information about ancestors in Mormon temple ordinances and covenants to seal families forever. If you wanted to interpret his report charitably, you could weigh the passage on intelligence about Russian experiments exposing prisoners in six-man tents to plague and the enemy’s certain commitment to using entomological warfare. You could highlight the last page, which describes steps for civilian defense and argue this was not research for a weapon at all. You could note his job class and conclude he was not a manager, just a person who followed orders, subject to many layers of approval. You could consider how he would have told himself he was protecting his people. That he was not the one to decide to unleash swarms on Black neighborhoods, he was just the one who wrote up the results. If you wanted, you could notice how much he is like you or how much like me, how carefully and conveniently some of us can be removed from responsibility. Somewhere in the document boxes soaked in the black ink of redactions and the red stamped words “classified” and “secret” are the reports on how much and what kind of training it takes to overcome the instinctive resistance most people have to firing a bullet into another person’s face. Someone with a name calculated the relative costs of making the kind of person who will drop the bomb, release the mosquitoes, keep the secret for the whole rest of his life. The farther from the drop zone, the easier it is. Sometimes, if the military has done its work with maximal efficiency, it takes a tremendous act of imagination to understand you have done anything at all.
:: The Flinch ::
The French Revolution begat the Napoleonic Conquests which stretched into the Crimean War and made Immanuel Nobel rich enough to send his boy Alfred off to France to study chemistry and become obsessed by nitroglycerine, enough to invent dynamite just in time to replace the family’s faltering business selling sea mines to Russia now that the Empire had fallen into peace, but the U.S. had flared up into Civil War, and I’m not going to say we shouldn’t have fought that one or cast judgement on revolutionaries in Haiti freeing themselves either, or give pacifist speeches to whoever it was who sold the rifles to Sioux warriors who took down Custer, though I would prefer to praise the data the military analyst and brigadier general S. L. A. Marshall gathered on the low firing rates of soldiers during World War I, his findings in Men Against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command suggesting up to 75% of soldiers could not bring themselves to aim at other humans because of some inherent humanity that takes enormous amounts of training or anguish or terror to overcome, though such training exists now, because Marshall saw this as a problem to be solved, by, for example, replacing bullseyes with human silhouettes and rapid fire testing. And though some researchers have called Marshall’s entire data set into question, I cling to a faith he found something true about us, because the beginning of the end of a war begins with a person with a heartbeat and a gun who does not shoot. It begins with a professor who does not give the student a gold star or a B.A., a pat on the head or Latin Honors for his unprecedentedly lethal schematic design. There is a father who does not send his son into the lab to save the family’s war business by inventing dynamite. There is a banker with equity and a mortgage fund manager with capital and they look at the options to invest but they do not. There are workers standing before fabrication machines and rail lines, dockyards, shipping containers and cranes and though their bellies will rumble and their children’s too, they do not fire. There are politicians with pens standing before a field of missiles and none of them fires and I do not fire and you do not fire either.
:: Naive ::
You could call me naïve, as the man I’m debating says I am, when I tell him about the data on WWI soldiers and their trigger fingers. Up to 75% did not fire or if they fired, they did not aim. The only conclusion you can draw is that they missed their targets over and over because they did not want to hit another person with a bullet. You could call my arguments facile, as some of my colleagues do when I say we should refuse to participate in the invention of weapons. When they say we would be giving up something like everything and I say, in Old English, a naïve was the central block of a spoked wheel. In Middle English, naïve was a clenched hand. Later it came to mean natural and unaffected. And then a lack of experience, judgement, or wisdom. A person deserving scorn and dismissal. I work for an institution led by people who want to tell a story about how the military will save us. They call this serious and responsible. They talk about “Dual Use”—wifi, GPS, blood transfusions, various vaccines, all developed for the military first. You’d have to be as naive as a poet, to think we could just refuse all that. I try to be a serious and responsible person. Wars have not stopped since we invented gas masks and herbicides. Who wouldn’t trade a cell phone for Hiroshima? Some people, I learn. Maybe a lot. I may be naïve, but I know what people are and I can imagine life without duct tape. It is a life without easy transport of ammunition boxes in the rattling cargo holds of newly-invented airplanes. It is a life where all the hoses leak, but there are no hoses because there never was the atrocity of a rubber plantation. Except maybe there are hoses after all because in this version of the world we all have gardens and some of us have relations in Ecuador and some in Sri Lanka and the rubber tree is a remarkable creature, holding her huge leaves up to the sky and who among us doesn’t love the way it feels to hold our lips to an arc of cold, clear water. I know what people are and I know violence is part of our nature, but it is also the nature of humans to recoil, to refuse, to flinch, to turn tail and run as fast as they can in the opposite direction of a bloodbath. I once taught at a university ten miles from an air force base and sat often with students who couldn’t tell you how they got from Fallujah to Survey of American Literature, why it is “The Yellow Wallpaper” reminds them so much of that buddy of theirs, they don’t want to talk about it, except maybe a little. But no. They know better, they think, than to talk about it. One of them doesn’t talk, doesn’t write about how the Army tried to wreck him of his tenderness by letting—making? I don’t know and neither did he— other recruits rape him during Basic. I didn’t know this about him at first. I was just an exasperated teacher sighing, Are you going to turn in the poems, or not? And then he was crying and I could smell he’d wet his pants on my chair. And I said then reassuring things as I thought, My god, what is this world? He never did turn in the poems and he probably does not think of himself as someone who is stronger than an oil-stinking miasma we call war, we call a government, we call our president, we call national interests, we call the economy, the GDP, the NASDAQ, the DOW, oozing across the maps. But he is. Even when the war poured its tar down his throat, still he would not let it take him. Let us all praise the cowards who looked at their blade, their own thin arms, the face of some kid in the window of a blown-out house trying to decide what he will live or die for, then shit their pants and cried like girls. Let us praise the girls who cried like girls, because that is what a person who can still feel their heart and their stomach and the way they breathe when they sleep and the feeling of a kiss from someone who loves them. Let us praise the clenched fist of naïve people, the way the naïve holds or doesn’t hold the center of the wheel. Let us praise the irresponsible and unserious people. Let us wish we could be so natural, so unaffected, could become once more someone who has never known better.
From the writer
:: Account ::
My current work-in-progress, A Natural History of War, is a collection of poems that considers how the history of science, the practice of making art, and the invention of universities dovetail with the creation of ever more “ingenious” weapons used in horrifyingly creative fashions. Each poem unpacks a specific incident or invention from the history of weapons technologies. For example, the medieval alchemist Henning Brandt discovered white phosphorous by evaporating, reheating, and condensing 1200 gallons of urine. What he first thought was the elixir of life has recently been dropped on multiple occasions in violation of the Geneva Conventions on civilians in Gaza.
And there was the particularly disturbing conversation I had with an engineer working in the field of biomimicry about the astonishing nature of jellyfish and what a researcher with War Department funding might learn from studying how they move through this world. Imagine machines like jellyfish drifting beneath a flotilla of activists attempting to break a blockade. Imagine what those machines could see and hear and threaten and assure. Now, any time I am struck by beauty, I look up whatever has moved me with the words “and weapon” or “and Department of Defense” or “and DARPA.” What I have learned has been horrifying, but also illuminating. I find I cherish the living world more than ever and resent more deeply than I thought possible the ways the war machine infiltrates the very fabric of our beings.
The United States government, in partnership with scholars and artists in higher education, has initiated or participated in a great many genocides during its short history as a nation. The invention of rainbow agents during the Vietnam War led to the creation of an entirely new category of human rights violation—“ecocide”—though in hindsight we see that this tactic was also used as part of the attempted genocide on Native American peoples through methods like the near-extinction of the buffalo on the plains, or closer to my current home, the extirpation of caribou in northern Minnesota. This kind of horrific ingenuity does not emerge in a vacuum—it gestates in the minds of clever and creative people, the kind who often work on university campuses like my own. Knowing how much funding an R‑1 institution receives from Department of Defense contracts, DARPA grants and other forms of military spending, and remembering that even the Iowa Writer’s Workshop received CIA funds at one time, I attempt through the poems in this project to tell a true story about what it means to learn, create, imagine, and dream at the heart of the empire.
Kathryn Nuernberger’s latest book is Held: Essays in Belonging (Sarabande, 2025). Her poetry collections include RUE (BOA, 2020) and The End of Pink (BOA, 2016). Her other essay collections are The Witch of Eye (Sarabande, 2021) and Brief Interviews with the Romantic Past (Mad Creek Books, 2017). A recipient of fellowships from the NEA, American Antiquarian Society, Bakken Museum of Electricity in Life, H. J. Andrews Research Forest, she is a professor of creative writing at the University of Minnesota. Recent work has appeared in Poetry, Iowa Review, West Branch, Gettysburg, Copper Nickel, and Southern Review.