Stopped at a red light,
we could not avoid the sight of him,
standing on the traffic island with
a crudely lettered sign:

Viet Nam Veteran.
Will work for food.

“Damn,” said my companion,
“why can’t these guys just
get over it? I got over it.
And a lot of guys who went through worse
got over it.”
In that instant I knew something
that had eluded me for thirty years.

I had heard his stories
over drinks and over dinner–
tried to understand.
I had watched his eyes grow
large and his mouth tight as he
described the colors of the smoke
from the stores of grenades that went
up when the track in front of him got hit and
the track behind him got hit and I had seen
his eyes darting to follow the chaos of combat and
his muscles flex as he told how he reached behind
himself and with one hand by pure adrenaline lifted
a case of 50mm shells over his head to reload as oil was
poured on the barrel of his machine gun because it was too
hot to fire and how he ordered his men to open on the village,
knowing there were noncombatants there…
What else could he have done?
They had been set up to draw the fire–ordered to stop
just short of the village to disclose V.C. positions.
When he came home, he took six months
to decompress–his body here,
his mind still in the jungle.

Some said to resist was cowardly,
a few thought it heroic.
For me, it was neither.
What else could I have done?
Beyond politics, beneath morality,
my gut understood
what my mind could not articulate–
that if I did not come home in a box
I would come home in fragments.
My soul would have lived forever in the jungle
while my body worked for food.
I turned to my friend and asked,
“If you had known
what it would be like,
would you have gone?”
He didn’t answer.