White Phosphorus
You called him Willie Peter.
He was so close he had to have a name.
Willie became who you were, more than a brother,
a part of blood and bone burrowing those tiny
flecks of fire into a body and leaving
freckle-sized holes for the soul to leak out.
When the shells screamed
into the heavy jungle no one cared about the animals,
toucans and tigers, monkeys and vipers, scrawny ducks
and water buffalo. You watched as they flailed, flapped,
pecked, and peeled charred meat apart digging
at the fiery embers one white speck at a time.
You unleashed this monster
with a radio, coordinates on a map, a call sign.
Some of your fellow soldiers laughed out loud
when wounded creatures fled the treeline.
You were all too young then to understand action
is character and cruelty is bred as Host for fear.
You found four Viet Cong
in a flowered meadow where they died pock-marked,
scarred like lepers, all twisted and reaching
like roots of a Joshua tree for life that wasn’t there.
Willie never asked for thanks. He knew his reward
would come later when you began another war.
by Contributing Poet Jim McGarrah Copyright © 2015
VWP 2015 First published in VietnamWarPoetry.com
Absence
I funneled them into single
lines at the roadblock on Highway One, patted
them down for rusty pistols, fuses
and trip wire that made this Tet
deadly for us milk-faced Marines who stepped
off the wrong trail at the right time; but all they owned
they carried
inside them, spitting out fragments
with chipped and broken slang. Beaucoup
mal. Dien cai dao. Beaucoup mal.
A brown and stunning girl
appeared in my hands, as if pulled from a hat
or sculpted from clay and light. She shook once
with fear and the taut spark
of her body jolted my cold circuits.
Then she was gone, running
south with a wave of refugees
toward the corrupt and declining China Sea.
The most beautiful girl I ever touched
ran from me.
She rushed past Buddhist monks,
past temple doorways curling with carved circles,
red dragons and snakes, past saffron
robes swirling in the wind that swallowed
the blanched light of dawn and lifted
the scent of nuoc mam,
urine and burned earth like incense
while Hue rose from the smoked horizon.
Tonight, as the wetness from a one-time lover
dries indifferently beneath
a fan overhead and I'm bored by the murmur
of her sleep, I drift back
to that roadblock and that strange girl's voice,
to her almond cheeks,
her thin lips, the slight white scar
beneath her left eyebrow,
to her hollow gaze and boyish breasts.
I feel her fingers, frail
yet resolute as a spider's web.
They wrap around my wrist, push
my whole being away.
I want to taste the red wonder
of her tongue, draw
those onyx eyes across ten thousand miles
of death and into me. Instead,
I reach for my pants, curse when my car keys rattle,
slip from this motel, and dream
of making love to her
with what's left of love inside me.
by Contributing Poet Jim McGarrah Copyright © 2015
VWP 2015 First published in VietnamWarPoetry.com
The Memorial Wall
- Of what benefit to me is the multitude of your sacrifices?
says Jehovah. I have had enough of whole burnt offerings and the fat of
well-fed animals; and in the blood of young bulls and male lambs and he goats
I have taken no delight. - Isaiah 1:11
1 - ARRIVAL
You said Quang Tri was quiet when compared to Detroit
on Saturday night. I, being corn fed, believed you.
"Quiet as an old whore’s bedroom," you said,
until the first whistle exploded and spilled
a mouthful of Tiger beer down my chin,
spraying the bolt on my new M-16. You grinned.
That smirk calmed all my fears
born in a place where ten seconds was a lifetime.
We lunged into a bunker when the next shell hit,
puppy clumsy. Like kids playing football,
chasing a fumble, we laughed, tumbling into darkness.
2 - HALFWAY HOME
Rice wine burned us both, but opium seared the marrow
from your boyish conscience.
Disappointed, you asked why I'd fired too far left.
The kid was pulling up his pants, an easy target
in the twilight. He reminded me of a robin I'd shot
with my BB gun, squatting, pecking the wet ground
unaware of my existence, or its own thin mortality.
I was ten then and crying.
Your smile froze after six months in that country,
hiding a heart hardened by a dozen firefights
and memories sewn into body bags.
Those eyes, glistening with assurance,
connecting us as brothers, barely flickered
through Thai stick smoke and a Dexedrine haze.
Reeking of white phosphorus and cordite,
you swore that only housecats killed for pleasure.
3 - SHORT TIME
It seems Monsoons came each day those last weeks
just to wash the blood away.
When our mortars hit the marketplace,
the barber's child died. Some stains
don't wash, like the memory of a sobbing man
whose only crime was cutting hair.
That's when I knew you were going home early.
The child's charred flesh made you unholy,
and the shortest distance from Vietnam to Detroit
was through blood atonement - your life for our sins.
When the shot popped, like a pricked balloon,
I realized you had fired it.
But, I screamed SNIPER to the corpsman,
so your parents could be telegrammed – HERO - stop.
Prying the rifle from your suicidal fingers, I thought,
you should have squeezed the trigger, not jerked it.
A clean headshot, instead of my right palm,
could have closed your eyes.
4 - AFTERMATH
We both flew home as casualties,
you in your coffin, me with my guilt.
You still deny me absolution
because you took the easy way back, Rick.
The dirt that covers your body now
fills my mind.
Each time I reach for some liturgy
to chant, some Eucharist to swallow
to understand your sacrifice, to bring sanity
inside the empty sound of a spring rain, I gag.
Here, in my kitchen, drinking cheap whiskey
like my mom sent us years ago in shoe boxes,
I grasp for some boundary.
If only I could leave you there in Washington, D.C.
on a black stone scarred with carved letters
and the tears of your children, unborn and unnamed.
by Contributing Poet Jim McGarrah Copyright © 2015
VWP 2015 First published in VietnamWarPoetry.com
Eating with Chopsticks in Vietnam
"L'homme est ne' libre." – Rousseau
"L'homme est ne' poltron" – Conrad
Eating with chopsticks was art not easily mastered,
or so I learned when the village elders led my squad
beneath the tiled roof of the old French schoolhouse
and fed us cahn cho in wooden bowls.
We rinsed it down with red rice wine in the noon
heat of the Lunar New Year
and I mastered the art before the meal ended.
Laughing, I balanced one grain
between those two sticks of wood while the air filled
with sweat and ginger, while the sniper steadied
his rifle in the fork of a rubber tree.
Marty pointed at my success, and babbled like a child
who saw the wonder in a rose petal for the first time
before he dropped face first into the scalding duck soup,
as if the sniper's bullet had pried open a small door
above his eyes, crawled in, and flicked the switch off.
In that split second I could have painted substance
within a shadow, written a book that breathed, sculpted
a living form from marble, or composed a score in silence.
I was supernatural, a Jeremiah in jungle boots who saw
the world's future between the rice on the wood and Marty's
blood and bone on my face like wet sand. Then I ran
for cover and hid behind a chipped stone wall.
by Contributing Poet Jim McGarrah Copyright © 2015
VWP 2015 First published in VietnamWarPoetry.com
You called him Willie Peter.
He was so close he had to have a name.
Willie became who you were, more than a brother,
a part of blood and bone burrowing those tiny
flecks of fire into a body and leaving
freckle-sized holes for the soul to leak out.
When the shells screamed
into the heavy jungle no one cared about the animals,
toucans and tigers, monkeys and vipers, scrawny ducks
and water buffalo. You watched as they flailed, flapped,
pecked, and peeled charred meat apart digging
at the fiery embers one white speck at a time.
You unleashed this monster
with a radio, coordinates on a map, a call sign.
Some of your fellow soldiers laughed out loud
when wounded creatures fled the treeline.
You were all too young then to understand action
is character and cruelty is bred as Host for fear.
You found four Viet Cong
in a flowered meadow where they died pock-marked,
scarred like lepers, all twisted and reaching
like roots of a Joshua tree for life that wasn’t there.
Willie never asked for thanks. He knew his reward
would come later when you began another war.
by Contributing Poet Jim McGarrah Copyright © 2015
VWP 2015 First published in VietnamWarPoetry.com
Absence
I funneled them into single
lines at the roadblock on Highway One, patted
them down for rusty pistols, fuses
and trip wire that made this Tet
deadly for us milk-faced Marines who stepped
off the wrong trail at the right time; but all they owned
they carried
inside them, spitting out fragments
with chipped and broken slang. Beaucoup
mal. Dien cai dao. Beaucoup mal.
A brown and stunning girl
appeared in my hands, as if pulled from a hat
or sculpted from clay and light. She shook once
with fear and the taut spark
of her body jolted my cold circuits.
Then she was gone, running
south with a wave of refugees
toward the corrupt and declining China Sea.
The most beautiful girl I ever touched
ran from me.
She rushed past Buddhist monks,
past temple doorways curling with carved circles,
red dragons and snakes, past saffron
robes swirling in the wind that swallowed
the blanched light of dawn and lifted
the scent of nuoc mam,
urine and burned earth like incense
while Hue rose from the smoked horizon.
Tonight, as the wetness from a one-time lover
dries indifferently beneath
a fan overhead and I'm bored by the murmur
of her sleep, I drift back
to that roadblock and that strange girl's voice,
to her almond cheeks,
her thin lips, the slight white scar
beneath her left eyebrow,
to her hollow gaze and boyish breasts.
I feel her fingers, frail
yet resolute as a spider's web.
They wrap around my wrist, push
my whole being away.
I want to taste the red wonder
of her tongue, draw
those onyx eyes across ten thousand miles
of death and into me. Instead,
I reach for my pants, curse when my car keys rattle,
slip from this motel, and dream
of making love to her
with what's left of love inside me.
by Contributing Poet Jim McGarrah Copyright © 2015
VWP 2015 First published in VietnamWarPoetry.com
The Memorial Wall
- Of what benefit to me is the multitude of your sacrifices?
says Jehovah. I have had enough of whole burnt offerings and the fat of
well-fed animals; and in the blood of young bulls and male lambs and he goats
I have taken no delight. - Isaiah 1:11
1 - ARRIVAL
You said Quang Tri was quiet when compared to Detroit
on Saturday night. I, being corn fed, believed you.
"Quiet as an old whore’s bedroom," you said,
until the first whistle exploded and spilled
a mouthful of Tiger beer down my chin,
spraying the bolt on my new M-16. You grinned.
That smirk calmed all my fears
born in a place where ten seconds was a lifetime.
We lunged into a bunker when the next shell hit,
puppy clumsy. Like kids playing football,
chasing a fumble, we laughed, tumbling into darkness.
2 - HALFWAY HOME
Rice wine burned us both, but opium seared the marrow
from your boyish conscience.
Disappointed, you asked why I'd fired too far left.
The kid was pulling up his pants, an easy target
in the twilight. He reminded me of a robin I'd shot
with my BB gun, squatting, pecking the wet ground
unaware of my existence, or its own thin mortality.
I was ten then and crying.
Your smile froze after six months in that country,
hiding a heart hardened by a dozen firefights
and memories sewn into body bags.
Those eyes, glistening with assurance,
connecting us as brothers, barely flickered
through Thai stick smoke and a Dexedrine haze.
Reeking of white phosphorus and cordite,
you swore that only housecats killed for pleasure.
3 - SHORT TIME
It seems Monsoons came each day those last weeks
just to wash the blood away.
When our mortars hit the marketplace,
the barber's child died. Some stains
don't wash, like the memory of a sobbing man
whose only crime was cutting hair.
That's when I knew you were going home early.
The child's charred flesh made you unholy,
and the shortest distance from Vietnam to Detroit
was through blood atonement - your life for our sins.
When the shot popped, like a pricked balloon,
I realized you had fired it.
But, I screamed SNIPER to the corpsman,
so your parents could be telegrammed – HERO - stop.
Prying the rifle from your suicidal fingers, I thought,
you should have squeezed the trigger, not jerked it.
A clean headshot, instead of my right palm,
could have closed your eyes.
4 - AFTERMATH
We both flew home as casualties,
you in your coffin, me with my guilt.
You still deny me absolution
because you took the easy way back, Rick.
The dirt that covers your body now
fills my mind.
Each time I reach for some liturgy
to chant, some Eucharist to swallow
to understand your sacrifice, to bring sanity
inside the empty sound of a spring rain, I gag.
Here, in my kitchen, drinking cheap whiskey
like my mom sent us years ago in shoe boxes,
I grasp for some boundary.
If only I could leave you there in Washington, D.C.
on a black stone scarred with carved letters
and the tears of your children, unborn and unnamed.
by Contributing Poet Jim McGarrah Copyright © 2015
VWP 2015 First published in VietnamWarPoetry.com
Eating with Chopsticks in Vietnam
"L'homme est ne' libre." – Rousseau
"L'homme est ne' poltron" – Conrad
Eating with chopsticks was art not easily mastered,
or so I learned when the village elders led my squad
beneath the tiled roof of the old French schoolhouse
and fed us cahn cho in wooden bowls.
We rinsed it down with red rice wine in the noon
heat of the Lunar New Year
and I mastered the art before the meal ended.
Laughing, I balanced one grain
between those two sticks of wood while the air filled
with sweat and ginger, while the sniper steadied
his rifle in the fork of a rubber tree.
Marty pointed at my success, and babbled like a child
who saw the wonder in a rose petal for the first time
before he dropped face first into the scalding duck soup,
as if the sniper's bullet had pried open a small door
above his eyes, crawled in, and flicked the switch off.
In that split second I could have painted substance
within a shadow, written a book that breathed, sculpted
a living form from marble, or composed a score in silence.
I was supernatural, a Jeremiah in jungle boots who saw
the world's future between the rice on the wood and Marty's
blood and bone on my face like wet sand. Then I ran
for cover and hid behind a chipped stone wall.
by Contributing Poet Jim McGarrah Copyright © 2015
VWP 2015 First published in VietnamWarPoetry.com
Bio: Jim McGarrah's poems, essays and stories appear frequently in literary journals
such as Bayou Magazine, Breakwater, Cincinnati Review, Chamber Four, Connecticut Review
and North American Review, among others. He is the author of three award-winning books
of poetry, Running the Voodoo Down ( Elixir Press, 2003), When the Stars Go Dark
(Main Street Rag Select Poetry Series, 2009) and a new collection of poems,
Breakfast at Denny’s (Ink Brush Press, 2013).
His memoir of war entitled A Temporary Sort of Peace (Indiana Historical Society Press, 2007)
won the national Eric Hoffer Legacy Non-Fiction Award, and the sequel, The End of an Era,
was published in 2011.
His newest nonfiction book, Off Track, was published in October, 2015.
such as Bayou Magazine, Breakwater, Cincinnati Review, Chamber Four, Connecticut Review
and North American Review, among others. He is the author of three award-winning books
of poetry, Running the Voodoo Down ( Elixir Press, 2003), When the Stars Go Dark
(Main Street Rag Select Poetry Series, 2009) and a new collection of poems,
Breakfast at Denny’s (Ink Brush Press, 2013).
His memoir of war entitled A Temporary Sort of Peace (Indiana Historical Society Press, 2007)
won the national Eric Hoffer Legacy Non-Fiction Award, and the sequel, The End of an Era,
was published in 2011.
His newest nonfiction book, Off Track, was published in October, 2015.
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