On the Eve of Destruction
The weekend Watts went up in flames,
we drove from Fullerton to Newport Beach
and down the coast as far as Oceanside,
four restless teenage boys three thousand miles
from home, Bob Dylan's rolling stones
in search of waves and girls and anyone
who'd buy us beer or point us toward the fun.
California. What a high. The Beach Boys,
freeways twelve lanes wide, palm trees everywhere.
And all the girls were blonde and wore bikinis.
I'd swear to that, and even if it wasn't true,
who cared? A smalltown kid from Perkasie,
I spent that whole long summer with my eyes
wide open and the world unfolding
like an open road, the toll booths closed,
service stations giving gas away.
What did riots in a Negro ghetto
have to do with me? What could cause
such savage rage? I didn't know
and didn't think about it much.
The Eve of Destruction was just a song.
Surf was up at Pendleton. The war in Vietnam
was still a sideshow half a world away,
a world that hadn’t heard of Ia Drang or Tet,
James Earl Ray, Sirhan Sirhan, Black Panthers,
Spiro Agnew, Sandy Scheuer, Watergate.
We rode the waves 'til two MPs
with rifles chased us off the beach:
military land. "Fuck you!" we shouted
as we roared up Highway One, windows open,
surfboards sticking out in three directions,
thinking it was all just laughs, just kicks,
just a way to kill another weekend;
thinking we could pull this off forever.
by Contributing Poet W.D. Ehrhart Copyright © 2010
VWP 2016 First published in The Bodies Beneath the Table by Adastra Press 2010
Song for Leela, Bobby and Me
for Robert Ross
The day you flew to Tam Ky, I was green
with envy. Not that lifeless washed-out
green of sun-bleached dusty jungle utes.
I was rice shoot green, teenage green.
This wasn't going to be just one more
chickenshit guerrilla fight:
farmers, women, boobytraps and snipers,
dead Marines, and not a Viet Cong in sight.
This was hardcore NVA, a regiment at least.
But someone had to stay behind,
man the bunker, plot the H&I.
I have friends who wonder why I can't
just let the past lie where it lies,
why I'm still so angry.
As if there's something wrong with me.
As if the life you might have lived
were just a fiction, just a dream.
As if those California dawns
were just as promising without you.
As if the rest of us can get along
just as well without you.
Since you've been gone, they've taken boys
like you and me and killed them in Grenada,
Lebanon, the Persian Gulf, and Panama,
Afghanistan, Somalia, Iraq.
And yet I'm told I'm living in the past.
Maybe that's the trouble: we're a nation
with no sense of history, no sense at all.
I still have that photo of you
standing by the bunker door, smiling shyly,
rifle, helmet, cigarette, green uniform
you hadn't been there long enough to fade
somewhere in an album I don't
have to look at any more. I already know
you just keep getting younger. In the middle
of this poem, my daughter woke up crying.
I lay down beside her, softly singing;
soon she drifted back to sleep.
But I kept singing anyway.
I wanted you to hear.
by Contributing Poet W.D. Ehrhart Copyright © 1999
VWP 2016 First published in Beautiful Wreckage by Adastra Press 1999
Beautiful Wreckage
What if I didn't shoot the old lady
running away from our patrol,
or the old man in the back of the head,
or the boy in the marketplace?
Or what if the boy — but he didn't
have a grenade, and the woman in Hue
didn't lie in the rain in a mortar pit
with seven Marines just for food.
Gaffney didn't get hit in the knee,
Ames didn't die in the river, Ski
didn't die in a medevac chopper
between Con Thien and Da Nang.
In Vietnamese, Con Thien means
place of angels. What if it really was
instead of the place of rotting sandbags,
incoming heavy artillery, rats and mud.
What if the angels were Ames and Ski,
or the lady, the man, and the boy,
and they lifted Gaffney out of the mud
and healed his shattered knee?
What if none of it happened the way I said?
Would it all be a lie?
Would the wreckage be suddenly beautiful?
Would the dead rise up and walk?
By Contributing Poet W.D. Ehrhart Copyright © 1999
VWP 2016 First published in Beautiful Wreckage by Adastra Press 1999
The Bodies Beneath the Table
Hue City, 1968 (or was it Fallujah, Stalingrad, or Ur?)
The bodies beneath the table
had been lying there for days.
Long enough to obliterate their faces,
the nature of their wounds.
Or maybe whatever killed them
ruined their faces, too.
Impossible now to tell.
Only the putrefying bodies
bloated like Macy's Parade balloons,
only unrecognizable lumps on
shoulders where heads should be.
The two of them seemed to be a couple:
husband and wife, lovers perhaps,
maybe brother and sister — who
could tell — but they'd pulled the table
into a corner away from the windows,
their only protection against
the fighting raging around them,
crawled beneath it — the table, I mean--
half sitting, bent at the waist,
close together, terrified, almost
certainly terrified, nothing but noise,
only each other, only each other,
any moment their last.
All these years I've wondered
how they died. Who were they.
Who remembers.
By Contributing Poet W.D. Ehrhart Copyright © 2010
VWP 2016 First published in The Bodies Beneath the Table by Adastra Press 2010
The weekend Watts went up in flames,
we drove from Fullerton to Newport Beach
and down the coast as far as Oceanside,
four restless teenage boys three thousand miles
from home, Bob Dylan's rolling stones
in search of waves and girls and anyone
who'd buy us beer or point us toward the fun.
California. What a high. The Beach Boys,
freeways twelve lanes wide, palm trees everywhere.
And all the girls were blonde and wore bikinis.
I'd swear to that, and even if it wasn't true,
who cared? A smalltown kid from Perkasie,
I spent that whole long summer with my eyes
wide open and the world unfolding
like an open road, the toll booths closed,
service stations giving gas away.
What did riots in a Negro ghetto
have to do with me? What could cause
such savage rage? I didn't know
and didn't think about it much.
The Eve of Destruction was just a song.
Surf was up at Pendleton. The war in Vietnam
was still a sideshow half a world away,
a world that hadn’t heard of Ia Drang or Tet,
James Earl Ray, Sirhan Sirhan, Black Panthers,
Spiro Agnew, Sandy Scheuer, Watergate.
We rode the waves 'til two MPs
with rifles chased us off the beach:
military land. "Fuck you!" we shouted
as we roared up Highway One, windows open,
surfboards sticking out in three directions,
thinking it was all just laughs, just kicks,
just a way to kill another weekend;
thinking we could pull this off forever.
by Contributing Poet W.D. Ehrhart Copyright © 2010
VWP 2016 First published in The Bodies Beneath the Table by Adastra Press 2010
Song for Leela, Bobby and Me
for Robert Ross
The day you flew to Tam Ky, I was green
with envy. Not that lifeless washed-out
green of sun-bleached dusty jungle utes.
I was rice shoot green, teenage green.
This wasn't going to be just one more
chickenshit guerrilla fight:
farmers, women, boobytraps and snipers,
dead Marines, and not a Viet Cong in sight.
This was hardcore NVA, a regiment at least.
But someone had to stay behind,
man the bunker, plot the H&I.
I have friends who wonder why I can't
just let the past lie where it lies,
why I'm still so angry.
As if there's something wrong with me.
As if the life you might have lived
were just a fiction, just a dream.
As if those California dawns
were just as promising without you.
As if the rest of us can get along
just as well without you.
Since you've been gone, they've taken boys
like you and me and killed them in Grenada,
Lebanon, the Persian Gulf, and Panama,
Afghanistan, Somalia, Iraq.
And yet I'm told I'm living in the past.
Maybe that's the trouble: we're a nation
with no sense of history, no sense at all.
I still have that photo of you
standing by the bunker door, smiling shyly,
rifle, helmet, cigarette, green uniform
you hadn't been there long enough to fade
somewhere in an album I don't
have to look at any more. I already know
you just keep getting younger. In the middle
of this poem, my daughter woke up crying.
I lay down beside her, softly singing;
soon she drifted back to sleep.
But I kept singing anyway.
I wanted you to hear.
by Contributing Poet W.D. Ehrhart Copyright © 1999
VWP 2016 First published in Beautiful Wreckage by Adastra Press 1999
Beautiful Wreckage
What if I didn't shoot the old lady
running away from our patrol,
or the old man in the back of the head,
or the boy in the marketplace?
Or what if the boy — but he didn't
have a grenade, and the woman in Hue
didn't lie in the rain in a mortar pit
with seven Marines just for food.
Gaffney didn't get hit in the knee,
Ames didn't die in the river, Ski
didn't die in a medevac chopper
between Con Thien and Da Nang.
In Vietnamese, Con Thien means
place of angels. What if it really was
instead of the place of rotting sandbags,
incoming heavy artillery, rats and mud.
What if the angels were Ames and Ski,
or the lady, the man, and the boy,
and they lifted Gaffney out of the mud
and healed his shattered knee?
What if none of it happened the way I said?
Would it all be a lie?
Would the wreckage be suddenly beautiful?
Would the dead rise up and walk?
By Contributing Poet W.D. Ehrhart Copyright © 1999
VWP 2016 First published in Beautiful Wreckage by Adastra Press 1999
The Bodies Beneath the Table
Hue City, 1968 (or was it Fallujah, Stalingrad, or Ur?)
The bodies beneath the table
had been lying there for days.
Long enough to obliterate their faces,
the nature of their wounds.
Or maybe whatever killed them
ruined their faces, too.
Impossible now to tell.
Only the putrefying bodies
bloated like Macy's Parade balloons,
only unrecognizable lumps on
shoulders where heads should be.
The two of them seemed to be a couple:
husband and wife, lovers perhaps,
maybe brother and sister — who
could tell — but they'd pulled the table
into a corner away from the windows,
their only protection against
the fighting raging around them,
crawled beneath it — the table, I mean--
half sitting, bent at the waist,
close together, terrified, almost
certainly terrified, nothing but noise,
only each other, only each other,
any moment their last.
All these years I've wondered
how they died. Who were they.
Who remembers.
By Contributing Poet W.D. Ehrhart Copyright © 2010
VWP 2016 First published in The Bodies Beneath the Table by Adastra Press 2010
Bio: W.D. Ehrhart served three years in the US Marine Corps, including 13 months
in Vietnam with 1st Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment.
The author or editor of 21 books and the subject of The Last Time I Dreamed About the War:
Essays on the Life & Writing of W. D. Ehrhart (McFarland, 2014), he teaches history and English
at the Haverford School in suburban Philadelphia, PA.
WDEhrhart.com
in Vietnam with 1st Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment.
The author or editor of 21 books and the subject of The Last Time I Dreamed About the War:
Essays on the Life & Writing of W. D. Ehrhart (McFarland, 2014), he teaches history and English
at the Haverford School in suburban Philadelphia, PA.
WDEhrhart.com
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