One week before the Armistice in 1918, a young Welsh lieutenant named Wilfred Owen was killed while leading his platoon across a French canal. He left a small sheaf of poems that have come to be regarded as among the most memorable poems on war ever written -- not only then but before and since.

		Samuel Hazo is director of the International Poetry Forum and McAnulty Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Duquesne University. He is a former officer in the U.S. Marine Corps, where he served from 1950 to 1957 (samhazo1@earthlink.net).

Owen's vision of war was tragic -- "The pity of war, the pity war distilled." He wrote of soldiers bombed, shot, gassed, shorn of limbs, driven mad or suicidal, aged beyond their years. And he had no illusions about true heroism that usually went unnoticed. Nor did he fail to see the hypocrisy that hid behind the vainglory and cowardice of those who sent young men to early death.

In a poem called "The Next War" he conceded that the hypocrisy would continue: "We laughed, knowing that better men would come, / And greater wars: when each proud fighter brags / He wars on Death -- for Life; not men -- for flags."

History has long since vindicated Owen's tragic vision of war. This is not to say that those who agree with him should become instant pacifists.

Pacifism regrettably ignores the fact that some wars must be fought because there are, in Winston Churchill's words, some things worse than war -- namely, defeat and subjugation. But all wars -- even a trumped-up war such as the one that is sapping the country today -- are experiences in loss. The poet William Stafford made the same point in the title of a posthumously published book of his essays: "Every War Has Two Losers."

Of course, such an outlook is not welcomed by lapel-pin patriots who view combat deaths statistically and have been known to say in sangfroid that we lose more lives on American highways than we lose or have lost in Iraq. The wishful presumption here is that there must be some mysterious equivalence between death by accident and death by design.

This same obscene defense surfaced during the Vietnam War, and it continues to be brought up by those who refuse to admit that that war was what the late Sen. Eugene McCarthy called it at the time -- "an exercise in folly." In fact, the very architects of that war came to the same conclusion, but regrettably they were 30 years and 58,000 American deaths too late.

No poets worthy of the name would have been capable of making such glib comparisons to "ease the pain" for the next of kin. On the contrary, they would have concentrated on the irreplaceable loss of life, and they would not have flinched from describing the horrific ways in which some of those lives ended.

Here is the final line of a much-anthologized poem by Randall Jarrell called "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner," which recalls the statistical truth that the estimated life expectancy of a ball turret gunner in combat was 11 seconds: "When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose."

And finally there is A.E. Housman's quatrain that should be posted on every military cemetery in the world: "Here dead lie we because we did not choose / To live and shame the land from which we sprung. / Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose, / But young men think it is, and we were young."

War poetry is rife with images like these. But occasionally one can discover a deeper theme, which is that soldiers are asked to place their lives at risk for the sake of others. Such altruism touches on what Wilfred Owen stressed in a poem called "Greater Love," a phrase drawn from "Greater love than this hath no man than to lay down his life for his friend."

Regardless of how some extol the pugnacious audacity of Gen. George Patton, the hauteur of Gen. Douglas MacArthur or the carpet-bombing, daisy-cutting mentality of Gen. Curtis LeMay and those like him, it is inspiring to keep in mind that our nation's highest decoration is not reserved for the pugnacious, the proud, the merciless or even the indisputably brave (who are given the Bronze or Silver Star) but for those who act with unselfish courage for the sake of others, even at the risk of their own lives.

It is undeniably true that soldiers in combat fight primarily for one another. For this reason it is quite probable that Medals of Honor will be given to men or women serving in Iraq as they were awarded to those who fought in Vietnam.

The fact that both wars were initiated and waged for spurious reasons and pretexts does not detract from the awards or the awardees. But it puts an even heavier burden of justification on those who ordered these wars in the first place.

A Shakespearean line from "Henry V" comes to mind: "If the cause be not good / it will be a black matter for the King that led them to it." The price that will be paid by these initiators is impossible to determine now, but the price already paid for the waste incurred in lives and treasure cannot be denied.

Robert Frost said as much in a poem called "November" that he wrote in 1938:

We saw leaves go to glory,
Then almost migratory
Go part way down the lane,
And then to end the story
Get beaten down and pasted
In one wild day of rain.

We heard " 'Tis over" roaring.
A year of leaves was wasted.
Oh, we make a boast of storing,
Of saving and of keeping,
But only by ignoring
The waste of moments sleeping,
The waste of pleasure weeping,
By denying and ignoring
The waste of nations warring.