The "Separation" here is both geographical and psychological: the yawning gulf between home and war fronts. Rather than foreign insurgents, uncomprehending Americans threaten the speaker's well-being on domestic soil. And just as the World War I poet Siegfried Sassoon dreamed, in "Blighters," of a military tank terrorizing gleefully ignorant British civilians, so does Powers fantasize about subjecting the laughing boys to wartime violence. But Powers, too, is now "separated" from the battlefield, and from the rifle he yearns to protect himself with. "No one could give it back / because it was gone," he writes, and the "it" could refer not only to the gun but also to something larger: his youth, his innocence, and whatever else he left in Iraq along with his weapon.
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