Death of the Ball Turret Gunner

Brilliant poem. I think it describes war in an interesting context. Essentially, I read it as the life story of an unnamed soldier (unnamed because, in the military, you are not an individual. You are part of a unit) in five lines. Its succinct nature shows how short this guy's life really was. He was probably very young--18, 19, 20--when he enlisted and was subsequently shot to bits. The poem opens with his birth and then immediately  (within the same line, in fact) speaks of him in the military, almost as those he went straight from being born to fighting in a war. Like he never had any time to grow up and really live. It's chilling really. Then at the end, when he dies, they wash him out of the turret with a hose. It's not a personal thing at all. It brings to mind a cold, unmoved feeling. It doesn't say they mourned. It doesn't say there was a funeral. Only that they washed him out of the turret with a hose, in preparation for another young man to take his place, almost like nothing had happened at all.