Psalm Against Operation Epic Fury by Jeff Callaway

Psalm Against Operation Epic Fury

By Jeff Callaway

Texas Outlaw Poet

"For I know your manifold crimes and your grievous sins: enemies of the just, taking bribes, and oppressing the poor in the gate." — Amos 5:12 (Douay-Rheims)

Lord God of Amos. Lord God of the gate. Lord God who splits the jawbone of every silence and makes it confess —

hear this.

Not a hymn for the comfortable. Not a song for the podium and the flag-pin and the man who sleeps well in a house that will never be bombed.

A cry.

From the gate of a burning country. From the mouth of a man who will not look away.

They announced it at two in the morning on a phone screen.

Eight minutes.

No address to the nation. No hand resting on the Book. No face before the people asking God to steady what was about to be unleashed on a world still sleeping.

Eight minutes on a phone screen.

And one hundred and sixty-eight Tomahawks were already in the air at three point six million dollars each — your money, borrowed money, money the unborn will spend their whole lives trying to repay.

O Lord,

You who held Abraham's hand above the throat of his son and said enough —

was there no angel in that room?

Was there no voice descending through the ceiling of that conference room at two in the morning willing to say the word wait?

Because peace was there.

Peace had a seat at the table. Peace had a meeting scheduled for the second of March.

Oman had brokered it quietly, faithfully, in the long shadow before disaster.

Iran had agreed — no stockpiling, full inspection, enrichment lowered to the floor.

The Foreign Minister stood before the world and said breakthrough.

He said within reach.

They bombed anyway.

O God of the orphan. O God of the widow. O God who counts every hair on every head that is no longer attached to a living child —

count them now.

The first missile found a girls' school at seven in the morning while the book bags were still warm.

One hundred and seventy-five daughters. One hundred and seventy-five teachers who gathered them in the way a mother hen gathers her chicks before the sky becomes iron.

And the press conference called them targets.

Eight thousand targets.

One hundred and fifty-three cities. Neighborhoods. Hospitals. Public squares where men drank tea at dawn and women hung laundry and children ran between the market stalls before the iron came and numbered them.

O Lord,

the Church You built on the bones of Peter — the Church that fired the furnace that forged Augustine and Aquinas and held Thomas More's severed head in the hands of the martyrs —

that Church speaks plainly in the voice You gave it:

The indiscriminate destruction of cities is a crime against God and man.

Not a miscalculation. Not a policy debate.

A crime. Against God. Against man.

Eight thousand targets.

Say it slowly. Say it the way a mother counts her dead.

Now hear how the fire crosses water.

Now hear what this bought the Americans who paid for it and were never asked.

Eleven point three billion dollars in the first six days alone.

Eight hundred and ninety-one million dollars every single day turned into smoke over a country where the peace agreement was still breathing the morning the bombs fell.

Eleven billion while the veteran sleeps under the overpass three blocks from the VA that cannot staff enough doctors to see him before his number is called for the wrong reason.

Eleven billion while the diabetic neighbor stands in the pharmacy aisle choosing between insulin and groceries but never both.

Eleven billion borrowed against the wages of children not yet born who will carry this debt like a stone tied around their necks at birth.

And now the Pentagon is going back to Congress for fifty billion more.

Fifty billion more.

Fill your tank.

Before the bombs fell it was two dollars and thirty cents.

Now it is four dollars. Now diesel is four eighty-nine. Now crude oil is burning at a hundred dollars a barrel because twenty percent of the world's oil must pass through thirty-three kilometers of water called the Strait of Hormuz —

and the Strait of Hormuz is now a war zone.

One man said it plain: this is worse than 1973. Worse than 1979. Worse than 1980.

You cannot have energy unless you have the strait.

And the only nation that won something in the first week was Russia —

Russia, which was feeding targeting intelligence to the enemy while cashing the check our war handed it.

The Catechism of Christ's own Church — paragraph two thousand three hundred and fifteen — says that spending on armaments impedes the aid of needy populations and thwarts the development of peoples.

We did not read it.

We read a phone screen at two in the morning.

The mortgage you were almost ready for — that first house, that spring you waited years to buy into —

mortgage rates jumped to six point five three in three weeks.

Sixty-three dollars more a month. Twenty-two thousand dollars more over the life of a thirty-year loan for a family that was already stretched to the last inch of the rope.

The house that was almost within reach slipped back out of it while the bombs were falling over a peace agreement nobody asked you to destroy.

Thirty percent of the world's fertilizer transits the Strait.

The food shock will outlast the oil shock.

Grocery prices are climbing. Medical costs are climbing. The Federal Reserve is standing in a corner it built itself —

cut rates and feed the inflation, raise them and kill employment, and either way the people at the bottom are the ones who bleed.

Your retirement account is in that corner.

Your neighbor three years from the finish line is in that corner.

And the S&P fell the day the bombs went off and the Dow dropped five hundred points before noon and the airlines bled and the consumer goods bled and the economists used the word they had not used in a generation —

stagflation.

A decade of recovery, they said. Not a news cycle. A decade.

Paid for with borrowed money and borrowed time and lives that will not be returned.

And now the names.

Not targets.

Names.

Captain Cody Khork. Thirty-five years old. Lakeland, Florida.

Sergeant First Class Nicole Amor. Thirty-nine years old. White Bear Lake, Minnesota.

Sergeant First Class Noah Tietjens. Forty-two years old. Bellevue, Nebraska.

Sergeant Declan Coady. Twenty years old. Des Moines, Iowa — posthumously promoted from specialist because he did not live long enough to receive the promotion while breathing.

Twenty years old.

He could not rent a car. He could not buy a beer.

He signed his papers at eighteen believing his country would not spend him on a bomb dropped while a peace agreement was still sitting on the table.

Thirteen dead. Two hundred wounded. Ten still critical in hospitals in Germany where the families flew on grief they cannot afford to hold a hand that may not squeeze back.

O Lord,

two Navy carrier groups are sitting in the Persian Gulf while the Pacific goes unguarded.

THAAD batteries were pulled from South Korea — South Korea, which sits in the long shadow of a nuclear-armed neighbor that notices everything —

pulled and sent to a war that started while peace was breathing.

Patriot interceptors that cost millions of dollars each are being knocked from the sky by Iranian drones that cost thirty-five thousand.

A senator said it out loud: the math on this doesn't work.

It never worked.

And China is watching every engagement over the Persian Gulf the way a student watches a lesson — taking notes on carrier vulnerabilities, refining doctrine for the day it turns toward Taiwan.

We are spending our readiness in the wrong ocean while the right ocean watches and learns.

So hear me now, war machine.

Hear me, you architects of fury, you board-room generals, you flag-pin congressmen who waved it through without a vote, without a declaration, without a hand on the Book —

hear what the Lord hears when the bombing begins.

He hears the daughters first.

He hears the teachers who pulled the children close when the ceiling came down.

He hears the twenty-year-old from Des Moines who signed at eighteen and will not be promoted while breathing.

He hears the family choosing between insulin and groceries.

He hears the veteran outside the VA.

He hears the first-time buyer who lost twenty-two thousand dollars on a war they never voted for.

He hears the food prices coming for the poor in six to ten weeks when the fertilizer shortage hits the shelves.

He hears it all in a language no press conference can translate and no flag can cover.

And I will name what I see the way Amos named it at the gate of Bethel when nobody wanted to hear it.

I see a nation that started a war on a phone screen at two in the morning.

I see a peace agreement buried in the rubble of the first night's bombs.

I see eleven billion dollars in the first six days on borrowed poor man's money.

I see gas at four dollars and groceries climbing and retirements bleeding and a Federal Reserve with no clean way out.

I see thirteen dead Americans and two hundred wounded and ten in German hospitals while the talking heads call it momentum.

I see two carrier groups in the wrong ocean.

I see China taking notes.

I see South Korea with the missile defense we borrowed for a war we chose over a peace that was within reach.

I see fifty billion more going back before Congress while the veteran sleeps outside and the diabetic chooses between the needle and the bread.

I see a Church that spoke clearly — last resort, just cause, proportionate means, protection of civilians —

and was not consulted.

I see a nation that has confused the flag with the Cross for so long it cannot tell them apart anymore.

O Lord God of justice,

I am not asking you to be gentle with the architects of this.

I am asking You to be just.

Hold the record they will never hold themselves to.

Count what they will not count.

Count the daughters in the rubble. Count the names on the medevac list. Count the futures cancelled by borrowed debt. Count the peace agreement signed and bombed before it could be honored.

Count the first-time buyer's twenty-two thousand dollars.

Count the veteran's cold night.

Count the twenty-year-old who was promoted after he was dead.

Count it all in the currency of Heaven where no phone screen changes the math and no press conference revises the ledger.

And I ask something harder still.

Open the eyes of the ones still choosing to be blind.

The ones in the pews on Sunday waving the flag like it is a ciborium.

The ones who have made the war machine into an altar and called the smoke incense.

Saint Augustine laid out the conditions. Saint Thomas Aquinas named the walls.

Last resort is one of them.

And everyone in that room knew peace was within reach when they gave the order.

There is no just war doctrine that covers what this is.

There is only what God sees.

There is only the daughters at seven in the morning.

There is only the twenty-year-old from Des Moines.

There is only the peace agreement under the rubble.

There is only the judgment that does not forget.

Seek good and not evil that you may live. Hate evil and love good. Establish justice in the gate. It may be that the Lord the God of hosts may have mercy.

— Amos 5:14–15

Seek good, America.

Put down the iron. Pick up the treaty. Count your dead. Count their dead. Count the daughters. Count the twenty-year-old. Count the eleven billion and ask what it could have built in your own broken country.

And if you will not —

then know this:

God is counting what you will not count.

God remembers what you press delete on.

And the daughters of Tehran

and Sergeant Declan Coady of Des Moines —

twenty years old, promoted to his rank

after he stopped breathing —

are not targets.

They are not targets.

They are not targets.

They are the ones whose names God knew

before you gave the order.

And He will not forget.

Seek ye the Lord and live. — Amos 5:6

~Jeff Callaway

Texas Outlaw Poet

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