I. Base Camp
From where I sat
in a five-ton truck,
it seemed he’d always been there:
nineteen, no shirt,
prayer beads bangling
with ID tags,
grenade rings
around his bush hat.
They stood by the road
chanting: New guys, new guys,
greenhorn GI’s.
Hey man, he said,
grabbing my gear,
move in with me.
Mostly, we filled sandbags
or unloaded trucks
or after dark on bunker guard,
sandflies biting our faces,
told half true stories
of summer nights in Missouri .
We dreamed of a cool place,
and once on detail,
sat for five minutes
in the ice house,
a Quonset hut
between the ammo dump and motor pool.
Block of murky ice,
stood stacked in silver bars.
They kept the bodies there.
It was the only cool place.
Then there was an airlift
to Nui Ba Den.
You should have seen him
waiting for the Chinook,
joking around,
a stereo from Hong Kong in one hand,
a carbine in the other.
They ought to make a statue of it.
II. Mountain
The noises at night on Nui Ba Den
are ghost of old Buddhists they said.
Cambodian tiger one thousand years old
hides in those caves, they said.
In mists among large stones
he spliced a strobe light
into the generator,
watched it flicker
in our bunker.
Hey man, he said,
let’s make it home,
make it like Kansas City .
We built partitions with
ammo boxes, bamboo screens,
hung posters of Colorado ski slopes,
rock and roll stars.
We swung in our hammocks
to the breezes of a GE fan.
We had it made up there.
Had it made until the rocket
shredded his clothes,
blew his billfold into a bush:
photographs, laundry receipts,
prescription for eye glasses,
shot record, best part of a letter,
five dollar bill.
III. Dream
We stacked him up
naked and hard
in a dark icehouse,
his pubic hair
a blond willow tree,
his body
a silver kind of ice.