On God

I taunted, “There is no God.” When accused of blasphemy, I shouted, “Ok, let’s prove it.” Incoming artillery sang a hymn to our supper and our big guns answered. Husky clouds darkened the east, and my fear of death blared its fetid breath: Dead men, dead rats, dead trees out on the ridge. As I ran, I shouted at God, gods, any goddamned god who’d made the world we lived in at that moment. Dead mothers, children with napalm-sizzled skin. I screamed fuck at God. The others hid in their bunkers and waited, hoped, I supposed, for a bolt of lightning, a blast, the one that counts. But nothing, nothing, just the biting stink of gun smoke, and incoming choppers loaded with wounded.

Fixed Bayonets

With bayonets fixed we lurched uphill through stunted, busted remains of jungle into open flesh of enemy trenches and blood splattered all the faces of tomorrow; the saffron tint of death marked every inch of gunpowder in the mist; din of hate a rolling thunder that still shakes the earth nearly sixty years later; we needed to kill those son-of-a-bitches and if you have not fought, don’t tell us what we needed, cratered in the birth of our bones, just waiting to have its moment and Goddamnit we had our moment, our death-lust dripping from the tips of our tongues, illuminating our need, driving bayonets home, the dark marble eyes of those saffron stained faces, the dead, some ours, mostly theirs, or at least that’s what we choose to remember and back home, in the streets, weeks later, years later, half a century’s fingers rotted away, we wander among our blood stained crowds, our saffron tinted skins blistered by memory, our postmortem eyes searching.

Triptych

Patrol

Skinny-backed old woman, a load of sticks in a wicker basket. We trudged along, one column on the right, one on the left. Worried about ambush. Opium smoke trailed from her pipe and sifted through the blood in our brains. Two blue birds flew over and we watched bombs fall on a distant mountain. Red and orange, the muffled thumps soon rolling through the bottom of our feet.

Chow

They fed us powdered eggs. Canned ham. Outside mud the color of blood. Chill snuck under flaps of the mess tent. Rain dripped from a cast-iron sky. We sopped ketchup with stale white bread while long-distance guns roared. The spirits of enemy dead hid with their bones outside our wire. Weak coffee, warm milk, damp sugar.

Sniper

A far snap of rifle fire pinned us in the bunker. Gonzales clutched a tattered magazine with pictures of naked German ladies. Two rats with stolen crackers ran between our legs. The song a bullet sings won’t make the top forty, someone said. That turd from the big city, someone said. Somewhere a dog barked. A dog? Out here? someone said. Spirals from menthol cigarettes, smoke signals.