Home From Vietnam

They're getting old now. They congregate only a few blocks south of where I live. 40 to 50 years ago they were in Vietnam. Among the homeless they usually move slower, The weariness of age and of other things, of drug use and alcohol, lost loves and families, bent and broken paths. You hear about the "thousand yard stare," where blank verse and silence show they're not actively seeing, though now most of the immediate trauma is gone, they are just lives forever changed, eyes both hardened and softened, former aspects compromised, the hand of war still upon them. My family had a big house in Youngstown, Ohio, with a room rented to a nice young guy named Dale. It was cool because he would throw the football with me and my brothers, and talk to us. He had short hair and a little bit of acne. In 1967 he went to Vietnam, killed within a week. They tell stories of night patrols, moving through water, streams rivers rain, mud and sodden clothes, 100 degrees in the shade, bugs, infection, panic, running through the jungle firing their M-16 behind them, of the Vietnamese people suffering, the dead lying along the road. Arriving in-country, the heat blasting you when you get off the plane, you are told look left, look right, and then that one of the two men you just saw will not return. Our country was then conflicted, and it was harder coming home, even though the orange fires and the smoke were far away, you lost a limb and they didn't appreciate it. There were a lot of booby-traps set, by the enemy, by the bureaucracy, by the times. I wasn't old enough to go and I'm not sorry.