Jamail Center for Legal Research
Tarlton Law Library

Near Cua Viet,
1967

An old woman knelt
Weeping her son
Into the earth.

"Mother, who did this?"
"Men," she said."

The War That Never Was

Vietnam
Was an unlikely obscenity.

I remember.
In the gentle cradle of Missouri hills,
Warm smelling children's days
On shade streaked park benches,
Rainbow bits of cloth suspended,
Bright stars, dark bronze
Against fade tunics
Too large for the emaciated traditions
They clothed,
While we shyly touched
And watched in whispered awe.
 
While I lay among the grass,
A band in a whitewashed cupola
Struck stirring tempos,
And in response
Traditions stood,
And standing grew full fleshed
Urging us
Toward promises.

When our fathers returned
Tight ranked
Down narrow Main streets
In proud cadence,
The duty of dignity satisfied,
We love them
In their glory.

We listened while
In Flanders field and Arlington
A bugle's tears
Washed white crossed fabric
Into gentle hills,
Dulce et decorum.
Deaf to the darker litany of Gettysburg
Could we believe
That heroes died

In that last full measure of devotion?

So we were drawn to Vietnam.
Synonym, we thought,
For glory, battle, courage,
Lacquered masks, we learned,
That coyly hid the face of war.

We children
Learned old lessons
In that schoolhouse of age:
The sweetness of life
In the presence of death,
The sharpness of fear
Beyond our nightmares' worst,
The subtle symbiosis
Of men at war.

Warriors, we returned
To find ourselves
Unwelcome
At our country's fires
Or among its honored dead,
Shunned by those who called us
To serve.
Expecting glory
We received indifference.

 In the war to end all wars
They lost a generation
No longer there.
In the war that never was
You have lost a generation
Who are all around you.

A Little Knowledge

He had memorized
The muzzle velocity of the M16 rifle;
The effective casualty radius
Of a fragmentation grenade;
The elements of a five paragraph order; and
The Marine Corps Hymn.

He understood the importance
Of maintaining
A proper interval on patrol;
Of accurate coordinates when
Calling in fire;
Of dry socks; and
Keeping his weapon clean.

He knew the secret
Of how men die
On fog covered hills,
The secret of what they say
In that last flake
Of their time.

He had learned the neocromancy of the odds
And the spells that might cure
Their randomness.
He had learned
He was tired of the war.

Perhaps the weight
Of all that added knowledge
Was just enough
To trip the Bouncing Bettie
That killed him near Khe Sanh.

Fifteen Years

Dreams are zephyrs,
Precocious maelstroms
Spawned at night,
Which blow across
The rise of morning
And disappear
When touched by light.

Memories are
Different stuff,
 Enduring, sharp
As whetted steel.
They cut more deeply
In the light.
Dreams are fantasy,
Memories are real.

In the jungle
Of these fifteen years
Crawl memories
You hear, and touch, and smell,
Hoping one day
You'll wake to find
They are just dreams
Of Hell.

Codes

People cock their heads to hear us,
Two whales singing, two dolphins clicking
About hootches, frags, and zipperheads,
Spooky, C's, fast movers and peace.
We're the best cryptologists,
Securing memories from those
With no need to know.

There was a time
When others had a need to know.
(Some of us were dying to tell them.)
We passed them every day
On the streets of Babel.
They were shouting to avoid
Collisions in the fog.
We were too tired, too new to shout,
Reborn in a world we did not remember.

The scientists of the species
Will someday try to find
Some intelligence in our sounds.
With hydrophones and microphones
And computers linked by telephones,
They will decide we can be trained,
That our mating won't be affected by carefully
Controlled groups of affluent watchers.

Cocktail parties will be held
To launch movements
To let us live in peace,
Like the whales.

Marion Henry Norman

      Khe Sanh, 1968

They took your life
 As if it belonged to them.
If only they had told me
They needed a life,
I would have given them mine.

I wonder
What they did with your life?
Perhaps,
If they don't need it now,
They'd give it back.

             -- Ca Lu, March 1968

I saw you dead
But never buried.
In my heart you've lived,
Laughing, smiling Hank.
I would keep you there forever,
In a memorial more perfect
Than hands could build.

Finding an end to my war
I can mourn you now.
And, in sadness, leave
This loving, painful,
Magic caretaking,
So I may live
At peace,

To celebrate your death,
To elevate your life,
And its conclusion,
Which was neither sweet,
Nor fitting,
Duty's harshest price
For which the consideration
Should have been honor.
         -- The World, 1983

Starlight Scope

He asked me if I would write these lines
To you.
He still remembers you,
You know.
He remembers finding you one night
In his starlight scope
Walking like a tethered diver
In a green gas sea.

He said that you looked tired, and
As he took up the trigger slack
You sat to rest beside a tree.
As he squeezed
You turned your head.
He thought you smiled, and
Then he felt the trigger break
And lost you in the muzzle flash.

He doesn't sleep at night these days.
He sits at the window of his room
And looks into the night.
When they check on him,
As they make their rounds,
He says he's looking for you
In the light green light,
From a star that died
A billion miles away
A thousand years ago.

Progress

Back in the World
They manufacture mornings
With ten minute breaks each hour,
When they speak in handfuls
About campers, vacations,
Children and childhoods, past and present.

In Nam
They wait for the slice
Of light that announces the daily gift,
That cheats the night of its finality.
Then they can speak in whispers
Of everything but plans.

Bootlaces

I hold the implements
Of the ritual of the foot
Above the congregation of my toes.
Forty-eight inches of cotton, black,
Ends neatly matched and ready
To writhe through holes and twist
Upon themselves until double wrapped
About the top and tightly bowed
They weld my boot and sole.
The miracle of the laces,
The adoration of the bunion,
The abortion of the blister,
A forgiven sin,
Give warmth and safety to these feet.

How quickly we would beatify
Even canonize, that Lance Corporal in Supply
Who'd issue laces long enough and strong enough
To wrap about this body
And weld it to my soul
To keep it warm and safe as feet.
 

The Easy Life

Life at those times was easy
To lose and to take.
Which made it all the more important,
At least to me
And to those who wanted it.
It was a question of entitlement.

When a child kills a robin
Does a blue jay mourn the loss
Or wonder at the choice?
Is there a "why" that rasps its mind,
That holds its wings from flight?
Who knows how long the child
Will dwell upon the day?
The hawk has different dreams.

All this speculation does nothing
To change the fact
That some children have never killed a bird
And some still do.

Caretaker

When they died
Vietnam had petrified his heart
And all he had
Was a little time
To borrow words
From the worn libretto
Of death in war,
Words that would never fill the holes
Of mothers, wives and other friends,
Much less his own.
They were gone, you see,
Every one of them.

Later,
When they came to him
In nightmares like flocks of crows,
Bits and pieces, sounds and smells
Of blood and flesh,
Or cold and silent as marble statues
From a Roman frieze,
He pleaded with them,
Wrote them poems,
And cried their names
In a hundred therapies,
Hoping his epitaphs, like headstones,
Would hold them in their graves.
They would not leave.

Later,
 When he came to understand
The gift that he'd been given
At the beginning of each day,
He began to mourn them.
He'd talk about them to his wife
And other friends.
He wanted to "make his peace with them,"
To "lay them all to rest."
He closed his eyes and prepared
To forget.
But they,
They were as clear, as young

And alive in him
As ever before.
They would not leave.

Now,
He waits for them to come.
Sometimes they surprise him,
As when he found them
Sitting at a table in the sun,
Six brave young men
In short cut hair.
But when he rushed to join them,
They broke into bits and pieces,
A smile, a laugh,
A well remembered gesture,
The color of an eye,
The way the sunlight caught one's hair.
Or they surround him softly,
As when they sit beside him
As he watches a sunset
Or a river as it flows among the trees,
But, especially,
When they come together
When he meets someone
Who knew them too,
And they resonate full fleshed
Between the two.
And he prays
They will not leave.

Divorce

The shards of the glass
Through which we had dimly
Viewed each other
Lie scattered,
Shattered,
Among the remains of an evening meal.
Their fracture smothered
In the silence of sleeping children.
While the two of us,
Bound to an unmoving earth,
Twist slowly amid the wreckage.
Circling like Sufi dancers
Heads thrown back,
Eyes raised to a lifeless night,
Each word exploding
Like a startled bird.

Fourteen Years of Days
(For the Old Men and the Sea)

Let me see today
As the lucid breath between
Expectation and memory.
An endless beginning
With no form to be grasped,
No substance to be held.
An always changing sliver
Of possibility.

Remind me that today
Harbors no anxiety,
Conceals no judgment,
Banks no anger,
Shelters no shame.
Remind me
That those are my contributions
To the day.

Let me accept all things
That flow upon today
As it trickles through my fingers
And winds its way
On its journey
From tomorrow to yesterday.
For it is jealous of neither
And satisfied in its time.

Give the Devil His Due

           -- for Robert Johnson

They say
That at the last stroke of midnight
At some godforsaken crossroad
You sold your soul
To the Devil.
What did you give him?
What did he take?
Are you sure it was the Devil?
Or just a frightened old man
Hoping to find a soul.
 

Charles Patterson served in Vietnam in 1967 and 1968 with the United States Marine Corps. He currently practices as a trial lawyer with Morrison & Foerster in Los Angeles. Patterson's Vietnam war poems were first published in a collection titled The Petrified Heart (Signal Tree Publications, 2002). His poetry has been published in numerous journals.