New Years Message

We are coming a New Year. A year when we have one less War. Yet there are rattling of sabers in the Straights of Hormuz. Below is a poem I wrote in Vietnam.

I was at LZ Uplift. It was quite there but there was a lot of activity in the Bong Song Valley just south of us. One night a young RVN Soldier was brought in to our Aid Station. He did not look seriously injured.

It was raining. There was nothing we could do for him, he needed to go to the next Hospital. There were two Helicopter services, Dust Off which was regular Army and MediVac which was the Ist Cav group. They were under different Command but had specific dutues. Medivac went from field to aid Station and Dust Off went from Aid Station to MUST Hospitals.

One of the MediVac Pilots was pacing and shouting. These men are some of the real heroes of the War. The pilot wanted to take the kid to the nest Hospital, but he could not. Dust Off had regulations about flying in the rain that kept them from taking the young man.

I went on to bed. In theh moring I went to the aid station and asked about the soldier. He died during the night caught in a Kafkaesque bureaucratic trap. I was devastated. The absurdity of war began to sink in. In less that a month we moved up to Quang Tri and I was working then in the aid station during the 1968 Tet Offensive. During that I did not have time to really take in the horror of what was around me, we were too busy jsut trying to keep these kids alive.

But back in the transquiltity of LZ Uplift, I had the time to reflect. It is called Winning.

Winning

Two souls unite in God's sweet vows
And Bodies in His Plan.
A new creation starts to grow
In her a newborn man.

From Sperm and egg to births first Cry
The careful plans unfold,
As cells divide and specialize
Into their perfect mould.

All Love and Care pours in that soul
As day by day he grows
And Father's strength and mother's gentle touch
His life begins to show.

The years pass swift and soon time comes
When he is full a man
And Country calls upon this lad
To give it all he can;

To March to wars he didn't start
And that he will not end
And on some foreign soil
Far from the sheltering womb
That nurtured him for better things
Than killing other men.
One damned impersonal shot is fired
One bullet finds a home
Into his flesh it rips and tears
And stops no more to roam.

Still, Deadly still , he lies
as blood pours out his flesh so torn.
A battlefield of "hims" lie out,
A feild of murdered men.

Two different uniforms they wear
Two tongues they probably speak
Two Countries mourn them now and many mothers weep.
Who from this has won?

I had my antiwar wall over my bunk in my barracks. No one ever said a thing about it. The work I am putting togerher and dispayed above was also put on my wall.

Here is a prayer that we may remember next time, to NOT go to war.