Lost Friends – Reverie 2011 – Day 18

I think, not of those I've met and lost contact with.  

I think instead of the soldiers who have lost parts of their bodies to mortar rounds, shrapnel, IEDs, things that come out of nowhere and everywhere.  Out of the sky, the sand, until the sky rains down and day becomes night and night is lit up like day.  

Lost friends.  Arms from the elbow down, the shoulder down.  Legs, feet, hands.  Bare roots of what once was.  Lives.  Lost.  Undone, unimagined, done.  Fellow soldiers.  The Captain whose wife was due with their fourth child, sure to be a Christmas baby.  That young private just in from L.A.  The 2nd Lt. on his third tour.  The last troops have pulled out of Iraq.  So we are told.  Think, though, of the friends they’ve left behind.

But this is better expressed by one who has served.  

A poem by Brian Turner – from his collection PHANTOM NOISE:

JUNDEE AMERIKI

                  Many the healers of the body.
                  Where the healers of the soul?
                                             - AHMAD SHAUQI

At the VA hospital in Long Beach, California,
Dr. Sushruta scores open a thin layer of skin
to reveal an object traveling up through muscle.
It is a kind of weeping the body does, expelling
foreign material, sometimes years after injury.
Dr. Sushruta lifts slivers of shrapnel, bits
of coarse gravel, road debris, diamond
points of glass—the minutiae of the story
reconstructing a cold afternoon in Baghdad,
November of 2005.  The body offers aged cloth
from an abaya dyed in blood, shards of bone.
And if he were to listen intently, he might hear
the roughened larynx of this woman calling up
through the long corridors of flesh, saying
Allah al Akbar, before releasing
her body’s weapon, her dark and lasting gift
for this jundee Ameriki, who carries fragments
of the war inscribed in scar tissue,
a deep, intractable pain, the dull grief of it
the body must learn to absorb.

Breakfast of Champions – Reverie 2011 – Day 12

The glass of fresh-squeezed OJ, the bowl of steel-cut oatmeal littered with golden raisins and walnuts, the deep black coffee colored with cream.  And the books of war poetry: Brian Turner, Yusef Komunyakaa, Bruce Weigl.  Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam.  I look into my empty coffee cup and wonder about the cold sweet water, the betel-black smiles, Nixon’s Christmas bombing, the way the world turns for the soldier shot down amidst elephant grass and the man who was once a boy on the coast of Oregon, where a beached sperm whale died and was then removed by dynamite. 

I load the dishwasher with rinsed dishes and think about the boy who lost his father, who watches the news, who learns nothing from a world so far from all the fighting.  How no one in his school understands, except the girl whose mother has just been deployed for the third time.  I wash the soaking oatmeal pot and consider the complexity of war, the way anapest and aubade, caesura and synecdoche, image and irony fall into place, just as thousands of miles away, men and women fall to the ground, a final act, no breakfast to follow.

After the Rally to Restore Sanity

We ended up at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, a very somber end to the day, and spent a long time there, especially at the center where the two wings meet, the dates 1959 and 1975 resounding. The remembrances and tokens left at the base of the wall included a Superman comic book from 1965 with a note that read, "Is this the one you wanted?" Pictures, poems, stories, letters. A single flower. But the one that really got to me was the box of Bandaids, the kind that are for blistered feet.

The Pretty Days

from a novel in progress

In Chu Lai the base was spread out in a fan of tents, once white, turned a rusty color.  Sand and wind.  Wind and sand.  South China Beach.  That wasn’t your first visual, though.  The first was the mountains.  The green of the hills.  The vast flats of rice fields.  And the river like a long blue-black snake.  All the places where you carried your guns, radios, half-empty canteens.  All of the places where you expected to die.

The best part about Chu Lai was the beach.  The sun, the crabs you caught and cooked, the bottles of tepid beer you drank, the hours you slept.  Until you woke up to the sirens.  And to the bright flares overhead, gold and red waves of light against the sky as you beat your way past the weight of sleep into the long, insistent sound of the sirens, of sergeants, of shouts that stretched out of the bunkers into the sand where, still, there lay the corpses of the crabs, their shells cracking under your boots, under your massive black boots.

And eventually the morning would come, more gold for your faces, your eyes like gashes against the early cloth of daylight.  And the fighting would dismiss itself like something only the dark was allowed to know and discuss.  Somehow there was breakfast and then more sleep, for some of you sooner than others.  An eventual swim in the dark waters beside darker fishing nets.  Another day, another blue sky.  You didn’t ask your purpose; you knew your purpose.  And yet it wasn’t that simple; it was clouded by the red dust of too many trails; it was complicated and out of control.  Still, you cleaned your weapon, packed your gear, and got ready for the next camping trip.  You knew you’d smell more than the sharp green scent of trees, you’d make your way through more than elephant grass, you’d flatten yourself into the days and then the nights and make it through.   

But for the moment the view through the rip in your tent was the beach and the sky and a thin line of horizon.  Those were the pretty days.  The days in Chu Lai.