In his fourth podcast, Jocko Willink (@jockowillink) admits that he was surprisingly affected by a video game ad that played at a UFC he was attending:
That poem was Alan Seeger‘s I Have a Rendezvous with Death — published posthumously.
Seeger was a Harvard grad living the bohemian life in Paris when the Great War broke out. Ever the Romantic, he joined the French Foreign Legion and went on to die at Belloy-en-Santerre on July 4, 1916 — famously cheering on his fellow soldiers in a successful charge after being hit several times by machine gun fire.
His former Harvard classmate, T. S. Eliot, apologized for Seeger’s out-of-style verse:
Seeger was serious about his work and spent pains over it. The work is well done, and so much out of date as to be almost a positive quality. It is high-flown, heavily decorated and solemn, but its solemnity is thorough going, not a mere literary formality. Alan Seeger, as one who knew him can attest, lived his whole life on this plane, with impeccable poetic dignity; everything about him was in keeping.
Seeger’s pacifist brother Charles was Pete Seeger‘s father.
Men are the disposable sex. Harsh to say, and the PUA’s will scream “beta!” when they hear it said, but true.
Men live to die, that the women and children and polity might live on.