Exercise of Virtue

And last, the rending pain of re-enactment 

Of all that you have done, and been; the shame
Of motives late revealed, and the awareness
Of things ill done and done to others' harm
Which once you took for 

                        exercise of virtue.

We had the experience but missed the meaning.

                                  --T.S. Eliot

                       1966   Chu Lai

    February 21

Our ship a scissor cutting blue cloth.

South China Sea dead.

Air, putrid calm.

The heat.

Like one of Coleridge’s ‘shrinking boards’ up on deck.

Worse down here, deep in the hold – the sweat

of all these motionless bodies sprawled

in layers on tiers of canvas bunks.

Soon we reach the coast.

          **************

Evening and no relief.

Ship sliding over nuggets

of phosphorescent algae – riding a sea

of emerald, ruby and sapphire.

Daylight and dolphins.

Flocks of flying fish scurrying from our sides

like geese from a northern lake.

Seventeen hours to the Vietnamese coast.

War still remains in newspapers, novels and movies. Were it not for this heat, should not be surprised if we were greeted by tanned surfers, anchoring off a California beach.

Feeling a little like Jonah

down here in the hold – listening

to the lapping of the sea as we disturb

its sleep. Much gentler than Jonah’s sea.

Wondering: have I also fled my city –

or do I search for a better?

Nineveh or Bethlehem?

Back to the beginning.

Begin again at the womb.

Living vacillates between being a thousand years old

and still in the belly of my mother.

March 8

Hit the beach six days ago.

Down the ship’s hull. Down the nets.

Like John Wayne in the movie, Iwo Jima that every Marine sees as soon as he is out of boot camp at Pendleton.

I’m out on Radio Hill digging hole to fill time. Sgt. Welch emerges from a green jeep and red dust calling,

“One volunteer!”

Veins of sweat flow down my arms

and belly, down my under shorts

and into my boots – over my eyes

and saltily into my mouth as it opens and volunteers,

“Here, Sir!”

“Get yer pack, Berg. Yer’goin’ out!”

A wind of fear draws heat from head and belly.

Legs and feet feel like frozen earth in winter.

This is not California.

Sgt. Welch drives me to the battalion command center. Helicopters carry out wounded. Others being shot down. Planes giving coordinates of enemy positions. Radios crackling. Operators replying. The hospital ship, Repose, lurking off the coast - a white ghost waiting to devour the wounded. Graves Registration is out of ice and bodies are being piled outside. A flack jacket is handed me and I run to a waiting chopper. A sleepless gunner, grey with dust pulls me aboard. We lift out over the wrinkled back of the South China Sea. We circle and head inland.

Villages appear. A bamboo grove and thatched-roof huts within a bush fence. Rice fields. Hills.

We bump to a stop on a hill that juts from a flat plain of rice paddies. At the command post tents have been erected with radios lining their sides. The battle is alive and wild toward the north. Four large hills surround a field of thick undergrowth. Large boulders and a few magnolia trees. Thick white smoke pocks the plain where our cannon strike.

This is not a drill.

I am ordered to another chopper flying into the battle. As I run toward the turning blades I pass a South Vietnamese soldier screaming at a Viet Cong prisoner whose arms are bound behind his back. The prisoner looks confused. He looks like a teenager. He’s squinting and he trembles. The ARVN soldier sweeps a pistol from his side like a gunslinger, and points it at the prisoner’s head. To frighten, I think. But he pulls the trigger. The frail prisoner drops as though the bones in his legs melted. This isn’t the movies. That was my only thought. No revulsion. Just simply that this is the real thing. Nothing else. The first death of my war.

I leap aboard the Huey and sit directly at the hatch – my legs dangling from the side as we rise. Puffs of black smoke pock the air around us. Instinctively, I remove my helmet and place it over my groin. As we descend to the side of a hill, thumb-sized holes suddenly erupt through the belly of the chopper.

A pebble of a plane – a one engine prop – flies low and drops a red smoke grenade near a group of lazy magnolias. A Phantom follows it, silent as a needle passing through water. It points its nose at the drifting smoke – dives and sweeps back into the sun as the target disappears in fiery napalm - our chopper rocking from the concussion.

In tall elephant grass we land. I jump, alone, blades still spinning – blinded by swirling dust, sand and sharp, seven-foot, elephant grass.

And silence. Alone. A Van Gogh sun and lavender flowers.

Then, for the first time, that deceitfully harmless whine of mosquitos,  Bizzt…bizzt, and the sound of rain hitting a tin roof – ping-ping-ping…bizzt..pingpingping…ping…ping-ping. I slap at my ear, then realize - rifle rounds around my ears.

No idea in which direction lays the enemy or the allies.

Should I call out in English? Perhaps the enemy is near. Shall I choose a direction and move silently?  Perhaps I’ll fall to friendly fire.

I choose silence and survive – welcomed by Pete Dawkins, the All American from West Point. He leads a South Vietnamese battalion - Red Hat One. We two are the only Americans.

I am Dawkins’ radioman for three days. Nothing is said of what happened to the Marine I replaced. I survive a knotted, fist-size chunk of shrapnel embedded, at noon, into a tree inches from my head.  An attack in the night. A morning when pieces of five Vietnamese are tossed into the air around me by an errant American shell.

An afternoon with seven South Vietnamese, each of us snuggled tight behind the other - ducks in a row - we crouch behind a tombstone-shaped stone marker at the entrance to a Viet Cong village from which we take fire for an hour. Unable to move, an ARVN in front of me urinates. Steam lifts from his trousers. At last, a Phantom rescues us with napalm.

bizzt…bizzt…

Flame!

March 9

My first body count. Late morning sun. Scores of V.C. dead in grassy field. The over-sweet stench of rotting flesh. From all over Viet Nam the daily count is calculated and sent to Saigon and forwarded to the Pentagon. Since territory isn’t taken we determine the score of the war by the number of dead each side piles up. I hear that it is printed in American newspapers – a box score in the bottom right-hand-corner of the front page. Like golf, a sport where the winner holds the lowest score.

As the sun heats the day - the smell of death grows intolerable. I vomit. One V.C. in his late 20’s lies peacefully on his back. The surprise of sudden death frozen on his face. Lavender flowers by his head. He is strangely animated as flies gather on his eyes. Seeking fluid, they swarm, black clusters writhing over each vacant eye.

Near the hand of another body is the photo of a young man. He sits in civilian clothes beside his wife who is holding a child. She is a widow. I know.

She doesn’t.

Yet.

March 24

Here in the sun, a rare wind slides down my skin –

savored like a sip of ice water in the desert

or the thought of my Laurel while in a crowd.

A twilight rain washes a month’s collection of red dust from the leaves and they glow green again. Straight out – the sea tosses over a small island of black rocks like an elephant spraying his back.

The clouds, once proud over the mountains,

tire and cuddle into valleys.

Flares begin.

April 9

Loneliness increases.

The heart is tired an in need of gentle words

and soft thoughts and feminine comfort.

An April evening.

A blood-drop moon

spills its vein

over the hills.

A wind…a wind.

This twenty-two autumned body

aches and holds an old man’s spirit.

Tired. Tired. Without ambition.

Standing between prayer and curses.

Someone, somewhere must understand.

A war ago I loved and thought I understood.

April 20

Back to a morning – a dawn. Walking alone after a night’s battle around a smoldering thatched hut and startling an old man with a thin, wise beard and weary, weary, war weary eyes, stooped on a straw mat – his family dead around him. His war.

And he saw me in that gluey dawn with helmet and sweat and pistol and foreign white flesh. He saw and shivered a shrinking, pleading shiver. His eyes burst with what life remained into a final panic of fear and he gave up – exhaled and slumped empty. Blank.

Only an old peasant. His crops now bomb craters. His roof burning. His cattle and chickens and children dead. Alone in the dawn with his grief his spirit collapsed. Without a bullet he died. His war.

April 27

At this moment for the first time in Viet Nam, I am alone.

A war movie is being shown the troops on a small screen - outdoors in the center of camp. A war film in the middle of war. Who will believe this?

To be alone is greater diversion and better entertainment than what the once magnetic screen might offer. It is true that if one cannot find a prudent companion who lives soberly, that he will do well to walk alone. I must always strive to keep friends who are wise and of greater character than I.

April 28

When we first arrived, an old Buddhist tomb - brown and broken in the trees and hidden from view - languished with neglect. Now that the general and the rest of the division have come, it has been re-plastered, whitewashed and painted red, green and yellow. It stands beside the First Marine Division flagpole.

Two hours ago a formation was held and Sgt. Westgate informed us that if we wished, we could extend our tour of duty here for six months and, “Everyone wishing to do so please raise your right hand.”

Incredulous silence

Exploding laughter.

Some fell to their knees with laughter and the formation lost whatever military bearing it had as Sgt. Westgate called without success,

“Fall in! Fall in there! You hear me, fall in!”

April 29.

From my radio I listen to two pilots. I watch through their eyes:

“Portrayal this is Junk Man. We got a lot a fire from the paddy on your right. Wanna rip em up? Over”

“Roger, Portrayal…Tally-ho…Rollin’ in!”

“Junk Man, this is Portrayal. You got ‘em baby! Blew all over the field!”

Last night a Marine company received five rounds of sniper fire from a thatched hut. They blew it up but failed to find any V.C.  Whoever owned the house would never endanger his property and family by firing from it. In all likelihood, the people who owned the place were underground in their cave-shelter and a V.C. fired from the home and ran, knowing that the Americans would destroy it and the owner would hate the white man for its destruction.

But there is a difference. I have yet to witness a willful act of terror by an American. I hear that some people in the U.S. accuse us of it, but I have seen no evidence of it here. Except, of course, the ubiquitous terror that all wars celebrate.

Assemble the young men, ships, wings and bombs,

coffin bags, widow-robes, orphan rags – as

the moral holiday of war is come

and throats of kings are thick with menacing.

Barking dogs and hissing snakes, loosed again;

and killing made a schoolyard exercise.

Medals hang from necks once owed the gallows.

Parades and song usurp the prison cell,

as nobles of the earth condone the deeds

that once, in peace, would damn a man to hell.

A patrol reported in a while ago. They came upon a young woman and her child. A V.C. had been harassing her when the patrol passed. The baby has a deep gash on his head and the mother bows and bows to the medic helping her.

April 30

A humid, rubber evening. I think back …

Autumn in Loring Park, a block from my bricked apartment. After attending the theater one night – Chekov’s ‘Cherry Orchard’ - I drifted through moonlight back to my room. Walking around Turtle Pond. Watching the grace of the silver swans.

Dreaming … dreaming…

Those proud with vain-pride rag years. Years endured on the false strength of adolescent dreams. Life always seems deeper as the hours pass and each day I smile at yesterday’s self and each generation laughs at the ignorance of the last.

I love life! I’ve never hated it with the intensity that I love it now.

May 1

I feel like I’ve been swung by my feet in circles. I have a son! I never really believed that I would live to hear of his birth. A son. Gershom. A stranger in a strange land.

How I would like to dive into a cool northern lake. Breathe the sharp pine air. Hear familiar sounds, familiar voices. Sounds and voices loved. Ah, but I am all muddled this humid moon-night.

The moon, so always there, from that first chaos in the darkness of the empty deep to this night’s wooing. What set you there, what purpose but to eye our desolation while we tread time like a child treads an evening lake. You sweet damn wonder of an icy, white round heart for those who have more heat than any sun could hold.

Seducer of more poets than any lusty sun. Somewhere, there in all your frosty scrutiny and chill resides a woman’s heart, as soft as the breast we once suckled when we puckered ‘round the sweet red nipple of the one who taught us love.

After Viet Nam is over the first thing I’m going to do is take a walk in an American wood and taste the deliciousness of not fearing the next may-be-booby-trapped step. I will walk free and be able to think without the omnipresent fear of Punji Pits or snipers, or waiting through the night for a dawn ambush. Perhaps St. Augustine was correct in his admonition to live each day as though death were to come with the setting of the sun – but I wait for the day when I shall be free from it.

May 4

I think this weariness I feel – this utter weariness is a good weariness. It is tired of the world as it rushes after its innumerable causes and wars and pleasure-seeking. Continually commenting on itself. Talking, talking about itself like the empty bragging of a bloated old woman about her spoiled child.

‘God is Dead’? How self-assured we sound behind pipes and spectacles and mental acne. Little children playing house in the house of our Father. With serious faces and pious gestures informing each other that he never existed as we shuffle about in his clothes.

May 5

An autumnal gloaming in May with goblin clouds and a witches wind. Like Shakespeare after two months of Goldilocks. I’m convinced that there is a chemical basis for the quickening of blood on such nights as this.

The monsoons have arrived. Last night they came. A dark shadow far out on the sea. Darker – closer – darker – closer… the first ripple of a wind, demulcent for a moment and suddenly, with fury, the monsoons arrive.

And the enemy quickens like Lazarus from his cave. Flares sizzle out over the shore and the ocean glows, a luminous emerald under moribund light. Foxholes flood muddily – their occupants vigilant.

Tents sag under the weight of water walls. Dust that swirled like baby powder under the boots that disturbed it, now suck-suck-sucks at the departing feet and boots fill immediately with water.

Rifles rust.

Clothes mold.

Feet rot.

And the enemy comes out into the wet like irritable flies importunate and remorseless to disturb our sleep.

May 8

Our ranks diminish as the war’s tempo increases. Field operations take more and more out into the bush, leaving only a few behind for the inglorious duty of baby-sitting for the General, digging holes and losing sleep over mundane radio watches.

 

 

The general has a house with a view. Standing on a breezy cliff over the sea. A view which I am content to be without. But which persistent guard duty allows me to share. With the General live the other high-grade officers who lead the war in I Corps. At night, after they are done with their drinking and poker and settle in for the night the area sounds like an old people’s home. They snore and cough and spit ‘til dawn. Occasionally, when a mortar lands nearby or a flare bursts close, the General runs out in his underwear calling, “Sentry! Sentry! What happened?”

No man looks like a General in his underwear.

May 10

Just received word that I am being transferred to a combat unit – the infantry. One more week in the security of the rear. One more week with friends or rather military acquaintances

 

May 18

After ten my days my literary appetite was Olympian and reading her letter it did grow by what it fed upon. Pages more I would relish – books, libraries of her words. Insatiable for more. Demoralizing, that another ten days will pass before another taste.

But I am rejuvenated.

A husky wind and low shapely clouds and her letter and the tense excitement that I will be transferred to where the daily action is – where the living stalk one another and where death stalks hell and occasionally heaven.

I shout, “I am alive! Breathing, laughing, in love and ebulliently alive!”

Just now memory evoked the scent of some perfume she once wore – bringing her image floating soft out of the shower; eyes bright, hair gleaming clean. I reach out…No stranger ever became to me a dearer friend than you.To no friend did I hand so precariously my heart. Of no friend was thought ever sweeter than the hope again of your presence.

Why then this looming fear making love a dreadful joy?

The further in I risk my heart the more I feel the knife. I’ve read of this in dusty novels but it was stuff, if true at all, of only sentimental fools. I have played fool to few masters and never was love among them; no fool of love, I.

I know, I know this is not real love. Is it? Not the genuine cobwebbed love of stuffy theologians. Not that ethereal angelic gauze that flutters through romance novels. Not the tottering reminiscence of rigid saints who have ‘fought the fight’. I know, I know. But, it is more than I have ever know nor read or hoped – this Anastasia of the heart.

May 20

Here with the infantry a week now. Still have made no acquaintances.

In this unit men are not inclined to new or quick friendships and they offer nothing but ice. I can’t blame them. They have seen too many killed.

They keep their friends few.

Previously, if the possibility of conversation were denied me or I shunned it by my own willed silence – I had civilization’s diversions to ease my days. But here there is nothing. Nothing but the red flash of tracers by night and sun and sand; patrols, firefights and snipers by day. So it builds. The isolation and the need and there is none to help.

 

May 25

Some men from our company patrolled outside our perimeter today to string telephone wire. They were attacked one click from camp but managed to pursue the aggressors, one of whom was later discovered to be a teen-aged girl. Her back was blown away in the ensuing firefight.

Ten years or twenty – man, woman or child – they are all capable of killing and mercy to the unmerciful is death to the giver of mercy. Or so I try to rationalize, after seeing her torn flesh. Then I see the body of the Marine she killed. She is small but her rifle is as large as his.

This war must be different. The evil and the innocent cannot be sifted from one another. It is the dying innocent to which I have difficulty becoming accustomed. We the warriors are no more guilty than the people back home and those who govern them.

May 29

Rain.

A myriad soft petals

Soothing the mind to a silken sleep.

Flowering peach blooms in Beijing

Without doctrine.

The war, once clean shaven, is whiskered, now.

May 30

I wondered today if, perhaps, I am trying to bribe God. I realize the impossibility of such, but still the thought passed. I’ve been so full of thanks to him lately that if a breeze passes I mutter a thank you. And I am thankful. But I caught just a hint tonight – somewhere in the mind’s interior – an inkling that if I continue thanking him he will continue to keep me safe. A low concept of a high God.

Chase off, chase off, these many beasts fattening in their lairs, and may the deep hollows where they crouched be filled with You.

 

June 1

Hollow stalks of bamboo

Chime woodenly in a small wind

Dangling from red and green string.

My candle tires

My eyes mist from a long yawn.

Morning.

June 2

My new quarters are of a more homespun quality. Quite unmilitary. The tent is of the grey-green canvass ubiquitous to the Marines, but all accouterments are native. From friendly villagers I obtained straw matting. These I placed on the ground and hung in circumference around the sides of my tent. A small table made of a grenade box; a shelf for my books. Concealing my olive-drab cot, a blue quilt - its cotton innards sneezing from the edges in dirty grey puffs. Insufferably hot, but it cocoons me from the evening’s onslaught of insects - and to keep me from rats’ claws as they investigate flesh in the night. A chopper drops in once a month with material for personal needs. I paid for M&M’s to toss toward my feet when a rat insists on investigating my face. A tall red candle supplies a flickering reading light. A coconut and pineapple rest on the grenade table.

With flack-jacket, ammo, helmet, rifle, radio and other military gear there is room only to step in and out. Nevertheless, it is the first time I‘ve had a place of my own since I’ve been in the Marine Corps.

June 3

Immediately after my last entry, I headed to my hole for guard. A chorus of frogs assists in sentry duty by interrupting their song when anyone approaches the perimeter barbed wire.

There is no moon.

Moonless - the frogs are quiet and useless without its light.

Just at midnight other posts begin calling around that they are seeing movement near my post. To my front are a few pineapple groves, a hut and some coconut palms. More reports that there are Cong moving toward post three – my post.

A sharp movement in a bush to my right and my hand jerks the pin from a grenade that I have been holding since arriving at my hole. I wait, holding the spoon against the cool heavy metal of the grenade. Then, a slow, swaying motion evidence that a person is moving in my direction. Closer…closer…it continues toward me.

My breathing stops.

Then, an enormous, dragon-like lizard, lumbers up to my parapet, stares me in the face and waddles off.

I sit clenching the spoon against its grenade. Seeing nothing. The sound of my heart certainly giving away my position.

Silence until the puff and plop of a mortar to the East. Wind blowing East to West. I assume it is a dud until choking gasps over the field phone, “Help, dammit! Can’t breathe – can’t see – my lungs – can’t breathe!”

Then begins the long glowing, red hyphens of tracers spearing the night. And the ping and pop of that deceitfully harmless sound around the ears. Not seeing anything and not wanting to give away my position I continue to squint into the night.

Pvt. Hosteller steps out of his hole, stands on a sandbag and yells,

“Come on an’ fight you yellow Slope Heads!”

He reads war novels.

Finally a flare. Just over me. Wagging softly down.

A light illuminating a movie set.

For a moment I forget that I am in a real war.

I see a human form lying fifty feet from me.

He is bare headed, face against the ground.

Exposed by the flare he tries to merge with the earth.

I feel no emotion.

I wait for the director to call, “Action!”

I think, “How real this seems.” And with the thought the realization

And fear.

The expression, ‘cold feet’. Sockless in boots they are icy and sweating.

I grow very relaxed and almost drop my pinless grenade.

Instinctively, military discipline brings my arm back to heave it.

The body lifts its oriental head and looks at me.

We freeze.

He prone with head lifted.

I kneeling with arm back.

Waiting for the director’s, “Action!”

My mind creaks and begins working unmilitarily.

This is no longer the anonymous enemy.

He has a face and a family and his eyes plead to live.

I recall the body count.

I lower my arm.

He smiles

A sighing, “Thank you, thank you!” smile in the dying-yellow-green flare light.

Flare gone.

Black.

Another up and he is gone.

I throw my grenade at the night.

Hostetler calls, “What happed, Berg!”

“Nothing – thought I saw somethin’!”

“Well don’t act ‘til yer sure next time.”

“Ya, Hoss.”

What have I done? How many Americans has this enemy to whom I have given life, killed? How many mothers will weep later because of his future actions and my choice of mercy rather than execution. Do I have the right to render mercy? Does any man in war have the right?

Morally wrong to have let him live. Perhaps another Marine has not killed and thereby will be the cause of my death some night. Damnation, just being – just sitting and breathing and still killing a man.

But I have known the difference also.

The feeling of virility and power as the earth shakes from bombs and screaming silver hulks of diving jets and artillery shells shredding the air like a knife blade tearing  through heavy canvas. And the concussion after a grenade is heaved and the scream of the dying and the victors and the smoke and sweat and danger  - then there is no fear.

Fear follows later. But in the moment of battle there is no fear. A little like acting – the fear leaves when you get onto the stage and into the role.

No one here seems to believe in that for which we are told we are fighting. The peasants do not want us. Everywhere I’ve been at least. The memory of an old farmwoman chasing, with a hoe, a tank that was damaging her field. A reed against a beast.

Containing communism? We blush at Cuba and sail proudly ten thousand miles away to help a perverted government. The V.C. and peasants are patriots, not communists.

After attacking a Viet Cong village one afternoon, discovered the ground littered with children’s pictures – some half colored with crayons.  Jesus on the cross and of the empty tomb. Easter in a Christian village. My brothers and sisters.

Buddhists or Catholics or Communists …No one is fooled. We fight only to remain alive and to avenge the death of friends.

Not because of any U.S. propaganda about,“Our fine young sons making the world safe for Democracy.”

 

 

 

June 5

 

Wax thick blood of Minnesotan youth

Runs cherry-Kool-aid thin in

Leech heat.

Nauseous yellow-vomit-light of flares

Illumines horror beyond celluloid.

Later – grey heads

Now freckled pale in shadows –

Will watch their blood again flow

Ketchup-red on film –

Read the glory of their war

And shake hands with a student

From Hanoi.

Glory –

Nepenthian opiate of the falling,

For the widows of the fallen.

National ambrosia of each war-bound generation

Fermenting in veins about to split

And gush hot-open to a greedy foreign ground

For its gargantuan lie –

I curse you.

Under the nebulous melon of November’s full moon

My thoughts drop

Grenades

Poised without pins

To be flung to the oyster-mind nations

Coughing of freedom and glory and war.

A warrior’s harmonica muffled by sand

Soothing my cantle-lit tent

With a sentry’s sad dirge …

From Agamemnon to Westmoreland

The requiem weeps…

and weeps…

and weeps.

June 6

 

The inadequacy of my vocabulary. The frustration of having outgrown it. I exult in life! Like a ripe plum splitting in the sun. Or a continual moment before orgasm.

There is the seed of a desire to remain here in the presence of death, which has set life on so colorful a rock. Life, like breath, was assumed until death’s ubiquitous lurk.

What is this day’s madness? I want to stop at each word and taste it. See if it has enough salt. Savor it – find if there is too much sugar. But the words come too quickly. There is too much to say. I rush on and on without restraint. Embarrassed, words dry moribund in my pen.

Is it the fault of the stream that it floods?

Thinking of remaining here

holds only the roots of the wind.

 Our wedding picture here beside the dying candle.

June 10

Stopping in a village.

Children cluster about and climb on one’s back

and one no longer cares that they might have a grenade.

An old man offers water and it matters not if it is poisoned.

A young girl hands a pineapple and one forgets

about the time a friend was decapitated when a grenade inside

exploded as he broke the stem.

Into my hole for the night.

June 16

Morning.

Rose-grey and reflected in a bayonet blade.

A dove with liquid-cool song not yet visible in its bush.

A rumpled rag-cloud muffles a mountain peak.

The midnight crescendo of crickets gone.

Dew frosting tent sides.

Dog barking at rooster crowing for the sun.

Morning – Joy of the night sentry.

Heavy with instruments of death

He lifts himself from his hole

Removes his helmet

Looks out at the peace of the jading hills

Turns and greyly shuffles back to his tent

To wait for the next patrol

And his turn in the hole tonight.

June 23

The moon like a sun bronzed breast

Thrusting plump from a woman’s blouse

Bursts from between the clouded Eastern hills

And rises into the night

White with milk

Begging to be fondled.

I succumb to the mystic temptress and am comforted by her calm and patient climbing round and round the continents and seas

unconcerned with our blood-letting over backyard fences

and fields of battle, and I understand the pagan worship of her.

July 10

I’ve been given the responsibility of watching over our chaplain, Captain *Capodanno, when he accompanies us on patrols. He carries no weapon. I once asked him if he didn’t miss being married. He looked at me, almost glaring at my impertenance, and replied, “I am married to the church of my Lord Jesus Christ, Corporal.” He’s lean and tall and doesn’t smile. Caring for his troops is serious business for him. He always seems dusty. He’s not like other chaplains. He goes out with us as often as possible. He’s fearless. He brings oil for last rites on each patrol. He’s oblivious to danger. There isn’t a hint of saccharine piety in him. He only watches out for us. I think he would lay down his life without a thought.

·      Father Capodanno died in combat giving last rites, months later. He received the Medal of Honor, posthumously. He is also up for sainthood. One dying Marine, while receiving the last rites, claims that as the chaplain placed his hand on him, he was healed.

July 17

Rain stops like a slammed door.

The silence of its absence is as deafening as was its roar.

Flocks of flying insects cluster around the candle flame.

The night is still.

Sky broken around a half moon.

Leaving in the morning with Bravo Company. Recon reports V.C. on a hill a few miles down river.

July 18

Boated with Bravo on a river patrol. Confiscated a fishing boat and, holding the boatmen hostage, covered ourselves with netting. Hoping to surprise the V.C. on their hill.

After a few miles we insert rifle barrels through nets to direct the boatman to turn toward shore. Pausing in a little fishing village we learn that our prey has escaped. I play with some of the children. Bellies swollen. Bleeding ulcers over their bodies. They beg for food and band-aides. A corporal offers his watch. It is rejected. It cannot be eaten. A young Vietnamese – perhaps seventeen – drags himself toward us. He has withered legs and heavy calluses on his knees. The other children give him most of the food.

On our return to camp we are ambushed.

In the valley.

No one killed.

Five wounded.

July 24

For the past week at gloaming, clouds heap in from the mountains. They hang grey and wet. Pregnant mongrels.

Never emptying. Passing away with the wind.

Tonight they arrived with swollen gray bellies. No breeze to steal them away.

Their waters break. The stored rain is smashing onto my tent. I duck under and push the canvass as it droops with collected gallons. The water rushes over the sides like an overturned bathtub rinsing Marines bathing in the rain.

The camp has gone naked.

Marines laughing and leaping – soapy and nude in the warm evening shower.

A sacrosanct act.

Cleansing the body for death.

Yesterday, Pvt. Joyner received a round in his rump.

I have his short wave radio. Classical music.

Rain and Bach.     Joy.

July 28

At noon, my squad humps into a small village on the bank of the Song Tra Bong river, looking for a secret cache of Viet Cong weapons. A sweltering day. The song of one bird melts in the heat. Twenty straw huts circle a center of hardened-earth where women gather to gossip, to cook and sift rice though the mundane days of village life. Just another day,

until we appear.

There are never any young men when we search a village.

Our interpreter grew up in the village. As we enter he sees an old woman squatting by her thatched hut. Suddenly, he's yelling and running at her. “I know her! I know!”  He screams. “I know from when I young!”

She's wrinkled as the South China Sea with shiny, black teeth and red lips from a life of chewing Beetle-nut, like all the women do. She's kinda’ bent over and mostly all bone from age and her feet are bare and padded with dusty callouses. She smiles a black, varnish-toothed grin.  But, when the interpreter sees her, his face twists. His lips pull up around his teeth. She keeps smiling like she’s glad to see him. She had informed on his family, he says. “VC kill my family! Every family! Even little sister!” He grabs her hair. It's long and dirty-gray and he yanks her head and pulls her toward a tree by the river. Its black roots rise up from the earth and twist out and over into the water. She looks at me, more like she's embarrassed than afraid. Like it’s a private family thing I shouldn't be watching.

For about the time it takes for the sound of a shutter clicking, everything stops - frozen beside the river. Like a dusty black and white picture found in a box in an attic. Like in an old Civil War photo I saw, once. Like maybe a hundred years from now someone might see of this old woman. Except, no one takes this photo here. Like it has no importance because there is no one to shoot it. Except, it's as though my mind is film and it'll be stuck there 'til I die.  Just like no one took a million pictures of memories that are in the minds of warriors of all wars ever. Pictures we think we'll forget. But, I think I might go up into an attic of my own for this one someday.

 If I live.

The interpreter drags the woman along; her heels gouge train tracks behind her in the dirt. He drops her under the tree. Her head strikes a root but she keeps smiling.

Younger women in black pajamas and half-naked children covered with sores and scabs,  run and hide among thick bamboo. Village children somehow know one English word: "Band-Aid". Where ever we go, like it travels through the air from village to village. They run after us, calling, "Band-Aid, Band-Aid!"  As though a Band-Aid possessed magic; a talisman to cure all ills and protect from harm. I wish there were enough for the whole country. Just Band-Aid it all up.

Two old men are rocking on haunches, watching with arms around their knees.

One has a thin, white goatee. Just rocking. Like they had no more interest than if they were watching a dog pee. But they never took their eyes away for a minute.

The village is built under a shady umbrella of high trees. Sunlight splays through leaves; huge, rubbery leaves the shape of elephant ears. Ribbons of sun undulate slow and gold through the green canopy, throwing shadows onto the thatched huts. The water is thick and moves real slow.  Unctuous as blood. Copper snakes-of-light squirm on the dark surface of the water. Hot. Humid. Feels like we're swimming in heat. Hard to even think. Didn't sleep the night before. For a minute my ears close down; I can’t hear anything; a silent movie in slow-motion color. The old grandmother keeps smiling, but won't talk; just smile like she's sorry for troubling us and just wants to go back to gossiping. Like we dropped out of a dream and we'll leave her as sudden as we came.

Then it's like someone turned the sound on again and the interpreter is screaming at her, his head is wagging around like a puppet. Spit drools out of his mouth as he lifts his foot and crashes his boot into the old woman's head, breaking her nose 'til it's flat against her face like a lump of squished clay. And I remember once when I was molding clay on a board in a high school art class, and I compare, for a bit, her nose and my clay. I feel numb and dreamy, like I'm not there; just watching everything like you feel when you haven't slept for a long time. I want to get in the river to cool down and wake up. The woman keeps grinning. There isn't any blood. He's screaming at her to tell us where the arms-cache is hidden. This makes the chickens go crazy and the children cry. You could see the children, terrified, holding mothers' legs and shivering in the heat among the bamboo.

The old men keep rocking.

The interpreter is shaking and tears are running down the dust of his face. He’s enraged. I think he is angry because he wants her to cry. I think that's all he wanted. Just to show she's sorry. I'm wishing she knew that's all he wanted so it'd all end. I don't believe this is really happening. This is not the ambiguous business of war. Not the brief, anonymous firefight that erupts without a face or rancor.

He puts his pistol to her forehead. I know how cold the metal is. I have one on my hip and while all this is going on I'm wondering how, no matter how hot the day is, the metal is always cool.  He presses it hard and her head tips all the way back and her tongue protrudes. It's all mushy and red. She puts her hands out, the way you do when you know someone real well and she says, (she never cried once), she says she would show us if we wouldn't kill her. Her voice is strange because of her tongue and smashed-up nose all spread out.

First, the pig pen she says.

So we dig in the muck and one pig is shot, just to kill something, but we didn't find anything. My boots still stink.  It wasn't me that shot the pig, though. On her knees she keeps shuffling around and pointing out places but nothing shows up. I'm guessing she's just trying to live a little longer. I'd do the same thing.

The ARVN has had enough. He runs back to her, throws her to the ground and begins kicking her face. No one stops him. She's crawled back to the river and the roots. She doesn't cry or protect her head but she stops smiling. Her neck bends over a root.

Soon her face is all caved in. You can't believe a person's face can look like that. Not even in a cartoon on TV does a face look like that. Her tongue hangs out like a dog. There was blood this time, but it didn't flow; it just oozed.

This is wrong I think.

But she did cause all his family to die, I think.

But, I don't have time to figure it all out;

if this is all o.k. or not. There just isn’t time.

You have no idea how fast things can happen.

The children grow quiet. I want to give them a Band-Aid.

Then he shot her dead in case she wasn't.

Lots of times.

Then he looked at the body and it seemed like he woke up or something and he falls beside her, lays his head on her shallow belly and he weeps. You can see the skin stretched tight along her ribs. His whole body convulses and he pats her leg and strokes it like he's trying to clean the dirt off. He pats her over and over. He tries to plug a wound with his finger. He rubs her stomach and strokes her bent-up leg. It's all askew like limbs can get when you die violent. He strokes her almost tenderly.

Like he cared.

    

The afternoon grows still and quiet and shadows keep flickering

all over everything like

minnows or maggots.

Than he pulls her off the roots. Her head falls back like it's hardly connected. I try to remember what she looked like a few minutes ago, smiling by her hut. I only watched it all, but it feels like I did it, too. And my mind takes another picture that will last forever.  I feel like throwing up. Maybe I did.

You have no idea how fast bad things can suddenly happen. There just isn’t time to think.

Then I had to get back across the river to search the next village; to Search and Destroy they call it. Going out just about every day to search and destroy. We don't know why. Someone just decides on a village and we're sent out to search and destroy.

We find a discarded, rotting boat in brush by the bank and we cut some tall bamboo and pole our way across the slow, black-eel of the river to meet the platoon on the other side.

 On the way, I look back toward the village (we didn't burn this one).  The women and children are gathered around the old grandma's smashed up, bullet-holed body. Pigs keep grunting around their own dead one. Chickens, helter-skelter, cackling hysterically.

And the old men, they just keep rocking in silence, staring at us without any emotion at all; not moving, just rocking and rocking and staring . Like they had seen so much they were beyond all war and the whole world itself.

Like they'd be there rocking when we we're all long dead.

       Just them all alone on earth, rocking, rocking.

       We never did find any weapons.

       And I didn't have any band aids.

       And we trudge on to the next village,

       and the next,

       and the next.

      

       Day after day after day, dragging misery along behind us.

August 1

Tomorrow we move camp across the river.

The hills are tired.

So many centuries without sleep.

Your picture here…

We’ve been apart a year.

An ink life we’ve led. This pen-marriage of ‘I love you’.

Last night you wandered into a cold and private loft of mine. I watched you smooth your tender comfort over me. Unguarded, I let you paint bright frescos on bare walls and spread a warm autumnal grace, as all the while your breath carved out in me a place for only you; a space that I allowed to let you own.

   The fragrance of your wrists at concert

   and your neck at night,

   the soft-woven silk of your voice

   I close my eyes

   the feather of your fingers down

   my the small of my back

   I catch my breath.

And now, a lover in an empty tent, alone.

Viet Nam is my home now. I’ve lived here always.

Am being shunned. Not because of my faith but because I revile the war. I am called not ‘Christian’, but ‘Peacemonger’.

To kill one enemy twenty innocents are risked.

What of my lost innocence?

August 6

We are quite isolated here. Miles from another military unit. As though we are the only ones in the war. We have gathered our tents to a pastoral hill. A river behind us. An enemy around.

I write only to clutter a page.

How will I talk when I return to the world?

I grow uncivilized.

The more I read the less I desire to think.

A zero with the rim rubbed out.

A fly feasting on feces.

A beetle crashing around in the dark – falling off summer screens -

discovered at midnight, belly up and kicking

on the kitchen floor.

‘When I return to the world.’

I stop and think of that: When I return to the world.

Selah.

It will bore me, I think. The pursuit of knowledge as a vocation holds little fascination now.

Udders throbbing –

Loins perpetually in heat –

We are free now …

Mucus minded

Midas thumbed – we are happy …Mooo…

August 9

Platoon crosses the river to join Alpha Company's base on a rocky hill above the bank. Arrive in the night. Try to sleep on a flat boulder. Around midnight the 2nd platoon of Alpha humps up the river and ‘borrows’ three fishing boats near Shark Island. They sail them to the mouth of the river and out into the sea where a storm hits them. We wait word in hot wind and rain. They radio me that their boats were caught in coral off the coast but they broke free and have landed on the peninsula outside the enemy village. We set out in the dark of the morning to cut off any VC who might attempt to escape inland. In the heat of the night we steal through villages, over hills, rice fields and sand dunes. My pack and radio gain weight as we go. I'm soaked in sweat an hour before dawn and am relived when we're ambushed from a hedge-row and I'm able to rest briefly after finding cover behind a dike.

Finally, we surprise the VC in the village on the peninsula, arriving at dawn with no chopper noise to warn them.

We kill 6 VC and capture10. Things that are not right to do were done in that village. The sorrow we caused. One can never be sure who is and who isn't VC. We rely on the ARVN to decide who to take captive, but they may have personal vendettas that inform their decision. We just can't be sure. Are we kidnapping innocent husbands from their farms and families because our interpreter holds a grudge against them? Some times we take both parents, and children run after us, pleading through runny noses, with arms stretched out. What are they supposed to do without parents? As we leave the village with our prisoners we are followed by a handful of little ones. A sergeant pulls a knife on them and, frightened, they stop, weeping as we fade away. We take fathers and wives and sons and are followed by a wake of wailing. We burn down thatched schools, houses and villages if we're told they might be the enemy's. On and on and on this goes. Patrol after patrol. Day after day. Nothing is accomplished in winning the war. Just destruction. Day after day. Night after night.

The unique horror of this war is that we the warriors, unlike those of WWII, quickly realize that we are killing for no known ‘good’. St. Augustine would not be pleased with this war that my nation has declared to be ‘Just’. Eventually, the guilt sets in.
It 's like throwing a cat against a wall to see if it has nine lives. After awhile you get sick to death but you keep going because it's too late to quit, having gone so far.

                                    ************

Given time enough and circumstance there is none who when provoked enough might not rise up and kill his brother in the field, succumb to wine after catastrophe or daughters after wine, exchange his future for a whore or pot of porridge, lift a knife over a promised son, slay a slave-master in the desert, offer daughters to a mob, pound a nail through the temple of a guest, murder a friend to have his wife, consult the dead, hold assassin’s cloaks, cry,

“I never knew Him!”

                      ************

Returning to our combat base we pass through a quiet village. A fisherman approaches. He appears terrified. The VC executed his father and they are now seeking him, but if he flees they will kill his family. To save him, and to convince the villages that he is our enemy, the ARVN beats him ‘til he bleeds Then, we tie his hands behind his back and drag him roughly behind us until we cross the river. There he’s freed and stumbles along behind us, his face a contortion of relief and despair.

August 12

Patrol ended. We sit - four Marines in the night. Drinking, talking, communing… revealing dreams and peccadillos . Lightless in the tent. Ghosts. Not ghosts – but ideas with weary voices vibrating in the dark. Strings of a universal violin singing dreams of what might be. And what might not. We four alive – talking low in the night. Talking…dreaming…

Then morning and the sun and strangers again in ubiquitous drab-olive green.

August 14

If one’s opinion of his empathy with God is of any worth, then I have not in my twenty-three years felt so far gone. Previously, however far I fell from grace, my desire was not to be separated, but to return.

I cared then.

Now I care not that I care not.

This does not alleviate fear.

It has amplified it.

 

August 18

Humping down the road to the river. Passing through a burned village. See a truck. A mile from the Song Tra Bong. Stop. Walk cautiously to the vehicle. Easily seen to have been ambushed. Bullet-pocked sides and windows. Open door, carefully. Remains of Negro Marine. Pieces of him splattered against the inside like fish flesh and phlegm.

Bucket of blood.

A foot and some fingers.

Recall having seen V.C. this mutilated.

Dog meat. No difference.

For the first time I surge with hatred for my enemy.

 

August 19

Return to camp. Go to Doc for relief from jungle-rot under my arms. Twelve-year-old girl lying on the ground in medical tent. Beautiful. Eurasian. Quiet. Shot in neck and pelvis. Shot by Marine or V.C. - no one knows. She doesn’t whimper. Stares tearless at me. I try, “Hello…”  She stares. Hate? Confusion? What do those eyes hide? That beautiful fawn which war has turned adder-eyed.

August 20

Have Cpl. of the Guard. Woman prisoner in the guard shack. A tag around her neck. Everyone who enters grabs the tag and her neck jerks as they read her history.

Mistress of V.C. officer. Seven months pregnant by him. He abandoned her. She is so fragile. Swallow-voiced. Proud. Pretty.

“Nuc?” I ask her.

She drinks the water thankfully.

She will be executed tomorrow.

Beside her a man. Old and wrinkled as the sea in which he fishes. He squats and rocks expressionless. Caught planting a mine on the road. He also, tomorrow.

August 21

Baseball and business, sidewalks and ice cream, school and movies – all seem so mundane after these day-mared months. Each death makes this war more foolish. To experience death for so meaningless a motive. To laugh at a friend’s joke and an hour later discover chunks of him. Exploding out of life with laughter and a grenade at the vague will of an enemy for whom he holds no animosity and who does not hate him. Two ideologies clashing in the air – unliving and unscathed.

Only the flesh - the living - drop and bleed. My anger is not against the V.C. or communists, but against the greed of ideologies that must kill to propagate.

Yet, to defend against these doctrines that kill – we must kill.

Ideologies rarely die through war – only people.

My bitterness leaks.

August 23

The heat and the death and the cursing.

I turn for relief to a worn volume of Chinese poetry.

‘The cold mountain turns dark green.

The autumn stream flows murmuring on.

Leaning on my staff beneath the wicket gate

In the rushing wind

I hear the cry of the aged cicada.’

There shall be war and rumors of war …

‘Cool perfume of bamboo pervades my room.

Wild moonlight fills the whole courtyard.

Drop by drop falls the crystal dew.

One by one the moving stars appear.

The fleeting glow worms sparkle in dark corners.

The waterfowl on the riverbank call to one another.

Everything in the world follows the path of war –

I sit on my bed meditating through the long night.’

Rumor  rumor   rumor     rumorrumorrumorrumorrumorrumor.

August 24

I sicken, war being the only subject I have to write about.

Last night had Cpl. o’ the Guard again. At three in the morning hear an explosion. Post ten screaming, “Help! God, Help! I’m dying! I’m bleeding ta death! Please somebody, somebody!”

I grab a flashlight and call Doc.

Doc comes running up the path, muddy from afternoon downpour.

I shine light in Doc’s eyes. Blinded he falls in a deep puddle. We run through hedgerows out to post ten. The post is built on a high boulder.

In the wet night we run.

Cutting legs and hands on thorns.

Stumbling up to the rock.

Moaning, moaning from above.

Climb up and shine light into face of injured Marine.

No face. Just blood.

The wind bends the grass, cool on my face.

A comfortable time to die.

Eyes open out of the blood. A mouth opens, shaking.

He is removed and I remain at his post, waiting for the sun.

Sun comes.

Blood sticky on sandbags.

Begins to stink.

His hat clotted red.

Stones matted in the blood.

I want out.

One begins to look at faces and wonder

what they look like shredded by grenades.

 

September 3

At twenty minutes to four, while relaxing in a tent, I hear what sounds like incoming rounds and comment to George and Collins. We have been discussing our return to the world and the irony of being hit now.

George walks to the flaps, ducks and yells, “It is incoming!”

Collins goes for a look and the two dash for rifles and a hole.

Thinking it is only a sniper I wait. Then comes the familiar wheeezzzing of more than one rifle. Rounds penetrate the tent. Whoever is shooting has seen the first two exit and is waiting for a third. I plummet, head-football-player-first, out the tent flaps. I make about ten yards before being caught in a wall of automatic fire. I drop and crawl. They are playing with me. Bouncing rounds around me. I go one way – shots in front. I go another and stopped again. Beginning to feel humiliated. Marines watching my dance from their holes. Dogs howl.

Angered, I charge a deep pit used for garbage – diving head first into the refuse without a wound. Buried safely in muck, I am aware of the dogs. Our camp’s stray mongrels always know. They are running in circles screeching and whining in a worried canine dance.

Garbage and dogs.

September 7

A tearful night.

A wind. A beer. Rain.

Lightning reflects blue on wet tents.

I am back across the river.

In the rear.

In a thatched hut civilized with music and electricity. Listening to boy-men recall past battles and wondering who will not return tomorrow.

I take another drink of warmth in the wind. Mosquitoes are thick – seeking groggy beer-blood. I wear socks on my hands and, in sleep, a towel over my face to keep from becoming one mosquito-bit lump.

Theodicy question:

Did he that careth for the sparrow

Make the mosquito and its arrow?

Glue hot jungle night

The breeze of mosquito wings

Worth the price of blood

Already I miss my tent on the far side of the river. My green-sleeved, cave-pocked, beautiful hills. I think of the future and it ends when I touch my native soil and my wife…

Tonight, I’m sailing home to your soft lips

to which, when I arrive, I’ll harbor safe

and strive to seek no distant, foreign port

for moorage. Other seas, dear, can’t compare

to your alabaster swells and belly.

My ship is not allowed your secret cove.

Yet, I would rather wait than run aground

mutinous and anchor uninvited.

Magellan sailed his world through southern Straights;

I also long to circumnavigate.

The rest is silence.

 

September 9

I return to our home camp. It is deserted. An operation has taken the majority of troops into the field. Thirty remain to defend the post.

A V.C. body is carried in. A woman. Since we’ve been on this side of the river twenty-four Marines have been hit by sniper fire. On the body of this woman a journal is found - a glorious and detailed account of the nineteen Marines she has killed with her Browning Automatic.

September 10

I believe it is beginning to get to my nerves finally. One cannot walk or sit in the open without the threat of snipers and automatic weapons.

Last night again.

Heavy volume of fire.

Run crouched to the communications tent. Grab mike from a new ‘Boot’. Patrol just outside the wire.

I call: “Mustang 2, what’s happening out there, over?"

A whisper. Shaking and sounding like a warped record,

“We’re surrounded…ssuurrr..round…ed. They’re all around us. Help, God, help…”

“Roger Mustang 2.  Will dispatch squad with corpsman. How bad are you? Over.”

“Bad…bad…in neck…please God…”

Rain monsoons onto palms.

Night black.

Cold.

“Roger Mustang 2. Can you get a Chopper in there for a med-evac? Over.”

A new voice answers,

“He’s dead, Mac’s dead. Where’s the squad? The squad!”

More firing. The heavy methodical ‘thuck-thuck-thuck’ of fifty caliber rounds.

“I’m hit! I’m hit!…where’s the squad!”

A new voice – Mexican. Difficult to discern.

“Mustang 2, this is Construe. How many of them are around you? Over.”

“Can’t tell for sure exac’ nomber – but hell a lot a ‘em.”

“Roger, can you crawl back to the wire?”

Silence.

 

September 11

The faith of this generation is that of a man turning on a light switch. He believes it will bring light. But wouldn’t be too surprised if it didn’t.

Darkness is upon the face of the deep; the land has reached the hour of lead - the fullness of time is come. Formless and void, the people recline in obese repose - curled within the tin thimbles of their theology - deaf to that Ancient Wind hovering over virgin waters and overshadowing the fierce silence of a spotless womb;

swelling at last with the promised bright but mourning star and a child is born

and nailed.

Then, in the Tetelestai of time, stars heave and stones

cry out and the earth opens and unto us a son is given …

again.

 

September 12

Called in med-evac this morning.

Before dawn.

The dead one and his buddy were out in their hole. Friend sleeping. The one on watch leaves hole to relieve himself. Buddy wakes – foggy and frightened. Hears movement. Shoots.

Friend falls – shot in back.

Mother or wife will never know the true cause of death. They will receive a report from the Corps on how gloriously he fought and fell in battle.

Alpha company took fourteen casualties last night. Grenade clusters. George, Hostetler and Collins among them.

Waiting word.

Do you know how people die in war?

Just as if you were walking down an American street with some friends and suddenly from some bushes you are fired upon and you duck down behind the curb and your friend is up on the sidewalk all squirming or open-eyed dead.

Woke this morning to the violiningggggg of incoming rounds.

Being probed every night.

They know there are only thirty of us here.

Expecting attack soon.

Ghost town here.

I believe that in heart, mind and spirit I was a stronger person

prior to this Viet Nam experience.

I have not, as I had hoped, overcome fear. It increases.

I have had enough

enough

enough.

 

September 15

 

All the world’s sorrow ascends tonight

Up into the black -

one leviathan tear

cold in the dark night womb.

The sorrow

the sorrow

the pain and the patience

of a people enduring

wells into a tear.

And a wind from the sea chills it

and the wind cries around it

as crickets

and martyrs

and war-ridden widows

for the dead.

The wail of a mourning wind

around the tears of two – of four millennia

suffering.

A myriad stars -

a thousand shores of sand-grain stars -

weeping through the night -

through the wind.

And I watch my fingers move around this pen.

They live.

Blood redding up my arms

through my mind

thrusting

down

my

legs.

And here, alive in my hole,

I would throw down metallic arms

and link arms of flesh

with the arms of those

who would let the heat of my blood

run into the cool night of weeping stars.

And I would cry -

“Look, my enemy!

Look at the misery crying down the wind.

Have we not had enough?

Not yet enough?

Come.

Let the politicians duel alone.

And you and I …

                                                     

                           shall share a cup of tea.”