Patriotic Poems
War and Tragedy

  
 

Contributor: Gary Jacobson || Poem Categories

To Flee or Not to Flee country as flag
To flee, or not to flee,
Was not my choice
For I really had no voice
But to Be...
Or Not To Be
That was the rub
Planted by Beelzebub
The birth of irritation
Chafing friction
Value systems bowing down to fiction
The specter of war harping on my mind
Killing a murderous bind
Fevered annoyance
The pressure of war's ungodly alliance
That stays with you...
Forevermore haunting you.

When I answered the call
To be one with brother's all
To win one for freedom
In tiny Vietnam
Oppressed by Communism
Impoverished barbarianism
Standing against America's withering firepower
Foolishly facing indomitable air power
Everybody knew at a glance
They stood not a chance
These Vietnamese country bumpkins
Who'd fall before us like mannequins
Shock and awe laying them low
Their men like grasses we'd mow
Quick death to bestow...
Before war weapons mightily blow

I was a babe in the wood
Not yet experienced in mud and blood
I knew nothing of death
Knew not of fears hoary breath
For killing was not a thing I pondered
Of chilling terror never wondered
For I was just a boy
Spoiled by the good-life cloy
Till the day called to deploy
Gung-ho and naive
In America all-powerful I believe
Believing fancy words absurd
I'd not the bell heard
For war'd be over in a moment and a day
God would rend that awful fray
So soon I'd be home again to play...

But it was not to be!
For war was infamy
Horrible beyond description
Abandoned in painful dereliction
Though explain it I often try
To tell you, myself, just why
Mother's forlornly cry
Girlfriends sigh
Angered at the great lie
Because their soldier's die
Ingloriously in the mud
Covered in stinking blood
Nourishing some far away hill
Hungered ghosts passing still
Nightly haunting their comrades in arms
Carrying them back there to a world of harms.
By Gary Jacobson
Copyright 2006
Listed November 22, 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