A Message to my Country
Rewrite & Copyright 1971-2003 by
Ed Howdershelt @ Abintra Press
This was written for a number of people,
most of whom will ever be able to read it.
For over thirty years it's festered
deep below my scars
The time I spent surviving
in an Asiatic war
The friends I lost for certain
and the guys we never found
And the over fifty thousand
who lie six feet underground
The times when those we went to help
set traps for us at night
Or cringed behind some cover
while we carried on their fight
The government who sent us
there but wouldn't let us win
And all the sorry bastards who
cursed draftees 'cause they'd been
And those who demonstrated,
throwing words and sometimes stones
Who formed such strong opinions
in the safety of their homes;
And they who only knew the war
from TV's nightly news
By journalists in Saigon
who inspired such peoples' views
The heat and dust and then the rain
that made it soggy hell
The vermin that disturbed our sleep
and constant rancid smell
That night that fifteen hundred rounds
of mortar fire came in
And Khe Sanh lay in ruins
while we wrote to next of kin
The villages we found
where Charlie'd been the night before
And left his vicious message
carved in tortured human gore
The drugs that some men seemed to think
would help to keep them sane
The only way that some of them
could handle so much pain
Those men who had just days to go,
but died there anyway
And those who had a year to go,
but died the first few days
The feeling of death's presence
in the dark from seven yards
Or of brotherhood with strangers
who can't leave the Veterans' wards...
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Rewrite & Copyright 1971, 2003, by Ed Howdershelt
(address update as of 1989: Spring Hill, FL)
First appearance in the Feb.1988 issue of "The Black Shirt" newsletter of the Great Southwest Vietnam Veterans, Arlington, Texas.
Do not use other versions that have been sold to magazines or websites.
Permission is granted to Veterans' organizations to reproduce this document as a fund-raising device SO LONG AS the money is NOT used to buy yet another stone or metal monument or piece of one. There are enough of them.
Let the money instead go to the Veterans themselves, their medical expenses, their wives, children, families, friends (or their medical expenses), or even just to buy another round of beer at a Veterans' gathering.
Indexes to my other articles and ebooks
may be found on my websites:
Abintra Press!
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