Good Night Love is by an intelligent man caught in the throes of combat, 
attempting to attach reason to his Korean War experiences as part of Love Company. 
 
 
 
 
This bloody essay is now part of America's war literature.
Good Night Love
(Love Company)
by DUDLEY C GOULD
Author of Follow Me Up Fools Mountain
A Military Book Club Alternate Selection (2003)
Trade Paperback; 48 pages
ISBN-13: 978-0-913337-56-1
Retail $9.95
Excerpts from Good Night Love:
I praised the dead I knew personally and as my admiration grew, it dawned on me that the earth is full
of soldiers in such numbers as stars in all galaxies; young soldiers gone under the earth to uphold the living,
losing their lives that others might prosper unthreatened; quitting life far from home, slipping unknown,
unhonored into the deep river of time flowing darkly along.
 
The surface of the earth, except where snows lie year-round, is strewn below with the bones of
exhausted soldiers savaged and bled. Gettysburg is the mass grave of my great-grandfather's beloved
drummer-boy son, who, as they used to say, died in the Glory of the Lord, and it's well-known how the
Western Front in the first world war turns poppy red each spring from blood of soldiers in the ground
ne funestentur, defiled by death. It did anyway back when people cared. Once there was a day set
aside for remembrance, limping veterans selling red paper poppies on Armistice Day.
 
There is no more Armistice Day and poppy vendors hobbled away long ago.
It has now been more than half a century since I led Love Company, 38th Infantry US Second
Infantry Division, living respectful of one another to our armpits in earth, good guys lined up against
what they said were bad guys over the valleys and hills. Actually, drafted Americans of every color
against yellow-skin, drafted civilians of North Korea and China.
 
Drafted unfortunates from each side soon became hardened murderers, as threatening sights and
sounds of combat quickened our interest in basic differences between life and death, and disturbed
anxious souls, as opposed to normal concerns over material things. The difference, say, between cheering
on a gaily bedecked Easter parade on a sunny Sunday, and being forced in soft purple overcast to witness
the tortured, blood-scabbed, fly-covered body of my fellow infantryman,
Jesus Rodriguez, six long hours dying.
 
We shared holes in dank earth learning fast together artes moriendi, art of dying, through periods of great
fear of what society is like stripped of sanity and what one's self is really worth, which can be truly learned
only facing death. Living constantly in fresh memory of unforgettable deaths, we, alive, basking in the
glow of the amazing selfless acts of our buddies, our mud-stained minds terribly hurt by their bad luck,
sharing with other heroic dead how wonderfully uplifting in death the human spirit can be.
Civilians and rear echelon military meet only the lucky survivors of combat; they should be made to feel the
great love and homage we combat infantrymen feel for our dead. Live whole lifetimes in half an hour's
shelling, turn yourself recklessly over to blind fate, forgetting petty worries that beset you stateside,
picky personality differences and money worries.
 
Heroes have always been called upon to die for those who are not heroes and for eons young soldiers fell,
as they do, serving uncompromising, legal old men, dying from blows of clubs, from spear thrusts and
flying arrows and, as industry merged with science, musket balls, shrapnel, aerial bombs, poison gas,
potential nuclear missiles and even more deadly technologies. Well-trained, handsome young soldiers
have always had to clean up after mediocre, old statesmen.
 
Few Americans know, especially don't want to know that their dearly-paid-for soldiers blood fertilizes
wildernesses the world over; where, in heavily paid-for peace, greedy money-makers scurry for profit.
There are more battle sites around the globe than peaceful cities today, many grown from campfires
of brave young soldiers whose air-thickened blood mortared the foundations of our civilization.
 
 
 
 

Good Night Love
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Two photos of Janey: A Little Plane in a Big War courtesy of Rich Heller, 
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