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Patriotic Poems
War and Tragedy

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Contributor: Gary Jacobson || Poem Categories

Search and Destroy country as flag
Moving into jungled shadow
Fateful darkness surrounds
Softly ensconced
Awaiting death
In bucolic tangle concealed
Everywhere endless
Forested columns hunger
To devour youth's innocence

Sergeants silently cajoling
Quiet lest the jungle heard
In words softly entwined
Keep'm swing'n girls
I'm not your mother
Just move one damned foot
Front of the other
Nam's wearied shuffle

A whispered smile
From beleaguered combatants
Stepping into carpeted green
Breaking tension
Stark fear stifling
Jokes fell flat
Lost in darkening thoughts
Of dying like erstwhile companions.

Negotiating hell and shadow
Mid belligerent obsidian jungle
Darkening cracks beaming light
Did that bush move?
Endlessly feeling following death;
What's behind that tree
Cautiously feeling its hot breath?

Stealthily amid snarls creeping
Feel the blood seeping
Rivers of sweat stream
Down pale ashen faces
Below camouflaged grime
My God.
Is Hell this hot?

Just boys next door
Gung-ho naive
Now men spread on a firing line
Slinking single file through
Labyrinths of tares
Don't let one round
Get you all.

Look up
There's snipers in the trees
Look down
A boobytrap's in the ground
Blow you to smithereens
Like my good buddy Jim
His leg in a boot
All we found

Found little pieces of Jim scattered
Across punji stake fields
Bamboo spears dipped in shit
To cut you
Bring fever of war
To war without cadence
No rhyme nor reason.

Vietnam's different
Than more civilized wars
No front nor rear here
Here abiding death's constancy
Harboring malevolent
Irrepressible fear
Boys fading in jaded stupor.

Picking leaches
Off tough sunburned hides.
Tending jungle rot
Waiting for the end
To find you
Laughing as in a game
At the junction of life
Numb unto death.

Making memories for life
Succumb to Nam's nothingness
Fortify ambivalent courage.
Glory long gone
To the rear echelon
Fighting a futile cause
Not allowed to win
Bloodletting green jungle turning red.

Fighting on rock and rill hills
Achieving costly victory
After countless brave actions
Abandoning our spoils
Let Vietcong back in
So we can take it again.
Again and again
Do-se-do promenade.

Men can survive their wars
Arising from jungle heat
Quicksilver unpredictable
March on with no reason why
Back and forth in the jungle
Shedding mortality
Violently deposing
A brother-in-arms normality.

Yes, Men can survive their wars
But not what they leave inside
Brave tortured souls
Its horrors hide
Under-fire
Tendrils of troubadours shoot
Up to eternity.
By Gary Jacobson
Copyright 1999
Listed October 2, 2010

About Author... In 1966-67, Gary Jacobson served with B Co 2nd/7th 1st Air Cavalry in Vietnam as a combat infantryman and is the recipient of the Purple Heart.

Gary, who resides in Idaho writes stories he hopes are never forgotten, perhaps compelled by a Vietnamese legend that says, "All poets are full of silver threads that rise inside them as the moon grows large." So Gary says he writes because "It is that these silver threads are words poking at me � I must let them out. I must! I write for my brothers who cannot bear to talk of what they've seen and to educate those who haven't the foggiest idea about the effect that the horrors of war have on boys-next-door."

Visit Gary Jacobson's site for more information

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War and Tragedy Poems | Poem Categories