Firefight, Sticking Points
FIREFIGHT
One person asked long ago before there
were words for it. What's it like?
Like nothing. This, in reply, the only
response you had then.
Even now, There are no precise words,
just fragments of images that remain like
unwelcome house guests eating out your substance.
It's this way:
A bush seems to explode.
Branches bend as if caught in a gale.
The muzzle blast of an automatic.
Bullets clip leaves nearby,
then you hear the chatter.
Your ears ringing, body moving involuntarily as if
the cells in your legs and arms and fingers
have memories separate from you.
You move in a consciously unconscious state
forward. The jungle thick around you,
bullets buzzing like flies approaching mach I,
your heart singing
a strange song
in your chest. It seems for a time
interminable. The riotous noise,
the advance into shadows.
Someone fires an M-79.
Others among the minuscule band
of blunt-faced Montagnard scurry forward,
low, bravely scattering rounds into ghosts.
You gather at boulders still wet from a tropical blow,
call on the horn for sky jockeys.
Chart coordinates. None of it rehearsed.
What's it really like?
A marvel of extemporaneous acts and actions
that seem dress rehearsed to the last detail.
It's the smell of nitrates in your nostrils,
it's your corpuscles swollen with blood,
the pores of your skin on fire,
your fingers numbed.
It's the smile of dark-skinned men
who can't pronounce your name,
but who know you to the quick.
It's falling off a cliff and landing
at the last instant in God's palm.
It's a memory, like sex with woman
whose heart you'll never tame
and whose name you'll never know.
Mostly, it's the afterward when
some light up and others eat rice balls.
When you lean against a damp boulder
and listen silent as a flower
to the Earth spinning in your head.
STICKING POINTS
A film of moisture lying
on the skin of the earth,
silky tendrils wafting up
from rice paddies,
Clouds sinking in the sky,
preludes to a torrent.
Write sticking points,
the therapist says, on this.
You run a finger
over the blank paper,
the straight black lines.
A map
to the past.
Stuck there in '66.
You watched him leave,
Brownie.
God and Noah
knew of the coming flood.
A thirty-rain
to eradicate sin.
No one that morning
was so prescient.
In otherwise eerie silence
soldiers slam bolts,
chamber rounds.
You stand in a slurry of
red clay and watch,
guarded and angry,
as the man who
takes your place takes in
a file of
doomed men.
Guilt, the therapist says,
is illogical.
Life you say
is illogical, absurd.
He reminds you again that
distorted thoughts interfere
with the present.
You tell him you didn't
kill enough, tell him
you know it's illogical,
a distortion. But the guilt,
well,
it's real.
You find it
in the birthday presents
you never open and
in the sock you don't hang
each Christmas morning, one
among the hundreds
of things you don't celebrate.
That morning,
a coming storm,
a march east
down the valley,
a first burst of automatic fire,
a first explosion of a mortar round.
The captain stops you
in the trench. You,
in harness and ready.
Says, a change in plans.
You aren't going.
Brownie is.
You stammer, B-but...
An order, he says, is an order.
Brownie hurries by, jogging
the load on his shoulders.
Sticking point No. 1
Can't control memories.
You fling your backpack
to the floor of the bunker.
One weight off,
another on.
Guilt like this is
a manifestation
of not knowing
who to blame when no one
is to blame.
You fill the void
with guilt.
It's illogical.
Write it down.
Give it words.
Fill a space left
by a man who
took your place
and died.
In group, the psychologist says,
you had choices,
pronounces the word as if the options
were all viable and equal.
Canada, resist the draft, desertion.
Ma'am, you say, leaning forward,
thrusting your chin in her direction,
the men in this room,
like those left behind,
didn't embrace those choices.
You see, they came from Ohio,
Kansas, West By God, Montana
died in 'Nam.
No flag at half mast
for any of them.
She falters, voice cracks.
It's in her eyes,
the look.
They're dangerous, angry,
unpredictable.
Soothe them.
The man running group
lectures about distorting
incidents,
about perspectives
when the past and present
intersect.
You say, excuse me,
but
noncombatants must realize
a unit, as yours was,
an A-team,
is an organic thing.
You lose a member,
you've lost a hand.
Two,
you've lost an arm.
You lost four that day
marched into the storm,
into an ambush, into your
history.
Refschneider, Fewell, Jacobsen,
and Brown. Could be the names of a
law firm or accountants.
Instead, they are names
etched into a wall,
Dead.
Their voices hushed,
January 22, 1966, Tra Bong,
Republic of Vietnam.
Forty years and more
you're stuck there.
When the anger ran out,
the void remained.
You fill it with restless nights,
with a duffel bag of memories,
fill it with what little you have.
