Soldiers In An Airport

SOLDIERS IN AN AIRPORT Soldiers on a bench in the camouflage fatigues of the Eighty-Second Airborne the Seventy-Fifth Rangers, or the most-deployed Tenth Mountain Known only to each other, they are adolescent eagles, their hooded eyes everywhere and every face a mask that has witnessed devastation at the barbaric bloody boundaries of our “international interests” They are distant from the shorelines of our honorable agendas and from the elected oligarchy that sees our twenty-something sons as the chipped but leading edges of a vintage battle axe that we increasingly de-value by hammering at wind and stone They are invisible to others in the shining glass and steel of this temple of global travel, but serious, shy and still they are resilient and committed and glad to be alive, their hidden hearts burning like the liquid-fuel fire of a Saturn V rocket, disposable and young, wary but determined, chipped but leading edges of a vintage battle axe!