Tet (February 1,1968)

Johnson shook my hand
with his sneaky Texas smile
and hissed me off to a land war
in a small Asian country where
there was no home front and US Marines
killed everything they could.

My screen door wasn't able to keep
the bugs from escaping when the bombs
began to fall and huge explosions
filled the humid air with their death
march and the tides of the South
China Sea seemed so far away.

"Born to kill," he said before he died in a
fast ambush with a slow M16 still warm underneath
his young hand as the music from the helicopter blades
reminded him of the end when an impulse
from a single cerebral nerve fired a last burst.

The embassy compound in Saigon was overrun and
microphones appeared to interview the MPs wearing
flack jackets pointing at the Stars and Stripes where moments
before a liberation flag hung with smoke in the indifferent air.

Nearby the National Chief of Police held his revolver to the head of
a man in a plaid shirt wearing nice navy blue shorts but
no shoes and the bottom of each foot was black when the bullet
punched a hole in his head just before the
spurt of red blood stained the street when he fell without
a trial and without a sound.  Eddie Adams working for
the Associated Press received a Pulitzer Prize
for his photograph of this frozen moment, which he never forgot.

General William Westmoreland wore a braided military cap and gave
encouraging reports while bodies were still being pulled from
the rotting paddy soil.

On time, the jungle animals chattered at and scolded the French and American
soldiers, carrying their shoulder fired weapons onto the pages
of the New York Times, walking over a street without joy,
looking in wonder at a land they could not own.

Dead babies were seen on white sand beaches.

Their black bodies were burned beyond recognition.

Skeletons walked from an open fire without expression.

Shadows failed to hide their pain.