We did not know, that grim December day,
The names we were so soon to write in blood.
E’en had our Yankee tongues been agile then
To dance around those foreign syllables
We still could not have spun the globe and put
Our fingertip on oceanic speck
To say with certainty: “This is the place.”
Who of the brightest of us, the best versed
In geographic study, on that day
Had ever in a lifetime heard the names
Tarawa? Bougainville? Oh, yes, we’d heard
Of Guam, the far-off Philippines,
But nothing else of what was still to know
Nor yet the price that knowledge was to cost.
They did not long remain unknown, those names.
One on the other they come thund’ring forth
Until in great metropolis and country town
Those awesome names no longer alien were:
Guadalcanal, Saipan and Peleliu,
Tarawa, Iwo, Okinawa -- all
We wrote in steel, fire, agony and blood.
On gunswept beach, in sick’ning island swamp
We seared into the mem’ry of our race
Each name -- until there were no more to write.
Known then were we. Uncommon valor was,
Men said, a virtue common to us all.
Who sounds them now, the names we boldly wrote?
Who stands before our ivied monuments
And hears the muted thunder o’er the years,
The awesome roll-call there memorialized?
A few. But yet while still a knowing few
Recall what price it was we paid to write
Guadalcanal, Bougainville -- all the rest --
A thousand years shall not erase those names.
