Equipment: Gulf War Poems - Softcover

Anthony Aiello

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0991004205 ISBN 13: 9780991004201

Publisher: Two Birds Publishing, 2014

Synopsis

When Anthony Aiello enlisted at age 17, he joined a peacetime Army basking in the last years of President Ronald Reagan’s rebuilding of America’s armed forces. The military intervention in Grenada had happened five years earlier and Vietnam had been fought by his father’s generation. But within days of finishing his training in boot camp and as a rocket artilleryman and joining his new unit at Fort Bragg, Aiello was loading up his gear to take part in the December 1989 invasion of Panama. When the most powerful non-nuclear artillery system in the world wasn’t needed to unseat the Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega, Aiello and his fellows breathed in relief, believing they’d literally dodged the bullet. Seven months later they were offloading their rocket launchers in Saudi Arabia as America readied itself for a series of Middle Eastern wars that continue to the present day. This is the story of a young man and his comrades in the Gulf War—and the battles that followed them home.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

In this collection of honed elegant poems, and in his informing prefatory essay "Setting Out," Anthony Aiello gives us what we've had precious little of to date: acute insight into the heart and mind of a Gulf War veteran. Here, Aiello bears witness to wartime's hellish pressures, its hours of vigilance and boredom, and its rare, almost impossible friendships, as well as to the years before and afterward and the myriad ways in which trauma complicates the ever-looping relationship between past and present. Equipment is a wise, deeply moving, and important book.

-Daniel Donaghy, Streetfighting and Start with the Trouble

About the Author:

Anthony Aiello is a writer and editor who lives in Brooklyn with his wife, cat, and dog. He fought in the Gulf War in a rocket artillery unit in the Eighteenth Airborne Corps, seeing combat in Iraq.

About this edition

• Publisher: Two Birds Publishing
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0991004205
• ISBN 13: 9780991004201
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 134