Authors Commentary

This poem is meant to show how a person is interacting with a veteran from a war, the start being a younger, innocent child, intrigued by the idea of "beating the baddies"

The middle isn't meant to be a critique on video games which portray real or even fictional wars, more of a critique on many of the people who play them. Often their only exposure to the history is through these games and then not bothering to speak to the people who've fought in them, or even going to a museum.

The ending is the person, older now, speaking to the soldier who has now passed, showing regret for his actions of ignoring the soldier for most of their life, as well as remorse for referring to the opposing force as either "baddies" or "enemies".

There is no specific war mentioned here, though we can assume it isn't any war before World War 1 due to the mention of video games, but the reason I chose not to mention a specific war, because some media has the ability to be far more general than they are, such as the song "In the Army Now", which could be far wider and refer not only to no specific conflict, but also no specific country, but they mention Uncle Sam, as well as Missile Rounds, meaning the song must be referring to any conflict the USA were involved in after or during the Vietnam war. This is what I wanted to avoid with this poem, trying to widen the spectrum of what war this may be referring to.