Price of War

I heard him say they honestly believed,

the village to be empty of any woman or child,

But we met resistance on the outside perimeter,

clearly, our intelligence wasn't complete when compiled.

For when we managed to fight our way into the streets,

there lay dead bodies of delicately small frames,

Nausea took over and confusion won,

damn the enemy and their filthy war games.

They knew as American soldiers, we were guilty by conscience,

whether the rest of the world held us responsible or not,

That we'd face those children in our sleep each night,

and our minds would eventually rot.

And the enemy laughed~ not caring at all that a child lay dead,

as though they were born to die by fault,

At fault for living in a time when their soil ran red,

like flies in a trap they were caught.

We moved from one nightmare and fell into another,

but our monsters under the bed were real,

The jungle proved to be a spider web of death,

with soldier's minds as the festive meal.

We were thankful for any moment of rest we could get,

except the blank stares of the dead that we entertained,

after a while we began to poignantly understand,

that it was our souls that would forever be stained.

It was no secret that if the Viet Cong didn't get you,

the environment done all it could to help justify their means,

The vipers, the mosquitoes, the leeches,

they were hidden under every rock it would seem.

And you done battle with it all, and too many didn't win,

and you began to envy the peacefulness of dying,

You had forgotten what it looked like to see another smile,

and you were much too exhausted for crying.

The face of humanity took on a new change,

it was stretched and distorted by view,

Each breath you inhaled became a trial by desideratum,

then you would doubt if it ever really belonged to you.

Numbness had eaten it's way into your chest,

and left an empty blackened cavity,

You now question the difference between right and wrong,

when all you've seen for months was bleeding negativity.

The smell of rigor mortis took up homestead in your mind,

it hung like heavy weights in the stale humid air,

It made you think twice about taking in breath,

for fear in lack of space you and it had to share.

While you set in a foxhole night after night,

with the enemy just beyond the next ridge in wait,

your mind travels back to once upon a time,

sparing you from the thoughts of your best friend's fate.

Back in America where we all would rather be,

we hear tell there are citizens protesting in the streets,

Carrying peace signs and holding hands,

Make Love, Not War, then on the White House steps they'd meet.

This they do while we crawl across another stiffened body,

like we've done so many times before,

Draft dodgers and rebellious hippies, a flower child in bloom,

just the thought makes a real soldier's heart grow sore.

And inside that large white tabernacle of righteousness,

sets the real men, smoking their expensive fat smelly cigars,

Running a war from behind the front lines,

calling the shots from their bullet proof cars.

They wanted Charlie's head, on a platter before the world,

and we were to do whatever it took,

Even if it left thousands laying dead on the ground,

they just chose not to look.

It felt as though we were being herded for slaughter,

being offered as a sacrificial motherless ewe,

Forgotten on the altar, left to suffer death alone,

a political nightmare come true.

Back in the bush, our morale was low,

it had been eaten away like the flesh of the dead.

We were fighting more than the enemy evils,

we were fighting the demons thriving in our heads.

There was only two ways out and that was quite obvious,

but neither way were you considered a winner,

Either you were carried out beneath the Stars and Stripes,

or you lived to be labeled a baby killer or unforgivable sinner.

One way or the other we each knew our time would come,

and by the time it did, how, just didn't seem to matter.

These jungles echoed in tune with the death march,

and there wasn't enough wind for our ashes to scatter.

We knew we would carry with us, those children's empty eyes,

and that feeling of guilt that would never fade.

In the silence and the darkness of our minds each night,

we'll hear their screams and last cries they made.

Time could never heal the wounds embedded so deeply,

that the insanity of this damn war sliced in our souls.

It's tunneled it's way through every clotted vein,

leaving the young to prematurely grow old.

Thirty-five years later many of us have found ourselves in tears,

looking at the articulately inscribed names on this Memorial Wall,

Knowing each one had future hopes and dreams, but instead,

for a purpose in which they believed, they gave their life, their all.

I'm sure all has wondered many times through the years,

how they managed to escape death from the pits of satan's hell,

For there were none any braver, any smarter, any greater,

than the ones on the Wall that actually fell.