Military wisdom says you should know your enemy, and the speaker of Mike Stone's "Moral Dilemmas 6" takes the advice so thoroughly that it undoes him. The proverb is quoted in the first line as something "they say", a piece of received strategy. Everything after it is the speaker testing that advice against his conscience. Knowledge was meant to make him a better soldier. It threatens to make him an unwilling one.
The poem's structure carries the argument. Apart from that opening statement, almost every line is a question, and most are short, single-line stanzas that leave white space around each thought, as if the speaker pauses after every one. There is no rhyme and no regular metre. The rhythm comes from repetition: "What if I learn... What if I watch... What if I read..." The anaphora feels like a slippery slope, each step small and reasonable, and the reader is carried along before noticing how far it has gone.
The list of things to learn moves steadily inward. It begins with the public, outward trappings of a nation: his language, his television, his radio, his newspapers. Then it reaches literature and poetry, where a people speak most privately to themselves. Then "What if I read his mind?" jumps from study to something close to telepathy. The last three lines are stripped to fragments: "His aspirations? / His loves? / His fears?" The sentences shrink as the enemy's inner life grows. The word "his" keeps returning, and each repetition gives the enemy another possession, another piece of a life. By the end he has a whole one.
Then the poem turns on its simplest line: "What if he's really like you or me?" The phrase "you or me" is everyday and unassuming, and it does two jobs. It makes the enemy ordinary, and it pulls the reader in, since "you" is suddenly standing beside the speaker. The question also exposes something uncomfortable. Killing seems to depend on not knowing, and the enemy has to stay a stranger for the bayonet to work.
The final line is the longest in the poem, as if the speaker finally lets himself picture the act: "How can I stab him in the heart with the cold steel of my bayonet / And not feel my own blood gushing along the runnel?" After a run of abstract, mental questions, the language turns physical. "Stab" and "steel" are hard, clipped sounds, and "cold" sets the weapon's chill against the warmth of "gushing", which is a wet, messy word. A runnel is a narrow channel, and judging by the context it suggests the groove along a blade. Whatever its exact reference, the image is deliberately reversed. The blood flows along the channel of the speaker's weapon, but it is *his own* blood he imagines. Empathy here is not a vague pang of guilt but something bodily, a wound that opens in the attacker.
The poem gives no answer. It ends on a question mark, and the title's "Dilemmas" makes sense: the speaker never says he will refuse to fight or that he will go on. The number in the title hints that this is one of a series, though the poem works perfectly well alone. The enemy has no name or nationality, and neither does the war, so the poem is not tied to any one conflict and can be read against any of them.
The poem is significant because it takes an idea that sounds like common sense and shows its hidden cost. Understanding is usually praised, yet here it is dangerous to the person who acquires it. The language is plain, almost conversational, and that plainness is the point. Nothing in the poem is difficult, which leaves the reader nowhere to hide from the final question.