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Vietnam's Verdant Jungle |
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Upon sandbag bunkers lined all in a row
Wafting over a verdant green jungle war of hate
Over shifting sands where hostilities profligate
We boys greet each morning, tempting bitter fate,
In a land where over the decades killings perpetuate.
Green grows the variegated jungle over fallen ghosts
Who once humped rice paddies of Vietnam hosts,
Like the jungle, shades of life here are variegated,
According to our sergeants very life's overrated
As we patrol the verdant green park
Chalky sweat roiling down faces honey dewed bark
Living in monsoon rains from daydawn into dark...
Politicians took up this quarrel with the Vietcong foe,
Sent a nation of boys where the brave dare not go
Courageously into the land of the gun
Irrepressible heat wilting under the hot Vietnamese sun
Taught to hate and kill, what will our future bestow,
In Vietnam's green verdant jungle grow?
Do we dead still feel that ancient quarrel
Putting all loving in peril,
When war's horrors revisit, lock, stock and barrel?
Heat, death and fear vie for attention
Darkest hour Memories held for a lifetime introspection
Forever mocking with deceitful refrain
Breaking faith, our cruel death was in vain.
Fighting in Nam's jungles in our mind still raves.
Nam's verdant jungle marks our poor graves,
As our country its warriors now sometimes depraves.
Though doves over meadows of our mind's eye
Still bravely with honor fly,
With songs they are singing refuting war's great lie.
We lived to make it back from that land of ghosts,
Our inner voice now incredulously boasts,
Though guilt abounds from pillar to post.
Still every night we're back there,
Again with our buddies heartaches to share,
Again in that bitter heated wind,
Wafting perpetually off the South China Sea coast |
By
Gary Jacobson
Copyright 1999
Listed
November 27, 2010 |
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About
Author...
In 1966-67, Gary Jacobson served with B Co
2nd/7th 1st Air Cavalry in Vietnam as a combat infantryman and is the recipient of the Purple
Heart.
Gary, who resides in Idaho writes stories he
hopes are never forgotten, perhaps compelled by
a Vietnamese legend that says, "All poets are
full of silver threads that rise inside them as
the moon grows large." So Gary says he
writes because "It is that these silver
threads are words poking at me � I must let them
out. I must! I write for my brothers who cannot
bear to talk of what they've seen and to educate
those who haven't the foggiest idea about the
effect that the horrors of war have on
boys-next-door."
Visit Gary Jacobson's site for more information
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