The Dangers of Smoking after Heaving the Dead into a Helicopter - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

The Dangers of Smoking

from an idea by Sheila Sharpe

In the foul heat and damp and rot and stench
After dusting off 1 the bodies of dead pals
The living and the dead, the living dead
Old Boats 2 lit off a cigarette and growled

“They say this stuff’ll kill ya.”


1 Dustoff – noun. Dust off – verb with an adverb. A dustoff is a medical evacuation via helicopter, as in “Doc, your dustoff will be here in three.” To dust off a patient, then, is to transport a patient, not to tidy him. I have recently read detailed arguments about the terms dustoff, dust off, and medevac, but no one quibbled about such minutiae along the Cambodian border.

2 Boats – a boatswain’s mate, the brains and muscle of the Navy. Boatswain’s mates do it all and are seldom acknowledged in history or art, not even in the recent film about Dunkirk. A boatswain’s mate is usually addressed as Boats, and always with deference, even by the C.O.