Stand-To for Night Patrol - short poem

  

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

Stand-To for Night Patrol

 

 

The Americans were said to believe that the Communists are on the defensive…

 

-New York Times, 11 January 1970

 

I keep seeing a boat’s black silhouette

Upon the red water, against the red sky

And the black-death tree-line along the shore

A dark, decaying scene, and I don’t know why

It Wasn't the Fourth of July - poem

  

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

It Wasn’t the Fourth of July

 

     That we may wander o’er this bloody field

     To book our dead, and then to bury them

 

-Henry V IV.vii.75-76

 

It wasn’t the fourth of July, but it was about then

Near the Cambodian border, on the Vam Co Tay

Searching for two American airman whose machine had gone down

Down, down into the steaming green Vam Co Tay

 

Bloated and floating, quite still when we saw them

The sloshy prop wash bumped them about a bit

Empty eye sockets, mouths open in silent screams

We poncho-linered their bodies aboard the boat

 

Cigarettes of despair against the stench and rot

This was not what we sang about in school

Veterans Drinking Coffee at the Angkor Wat Happy Doughnut Shop on the Fourth of July - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

Veterans Drinking Coffee at the Angkor Wat Happy Doughnut Shop

on the Fourth of July

Everything else was closed, so here we are
At the next table three textbooks are spread:
Physics, Algebra II, and Calculus
The owner’s kid, wiping counters today

Come-from-away children cook and clean, sweep floors
And in between their chores are at their books
The native-born are still abed, asleep
In a smart-phone hangover of lethargy

Last night a man rattled on about glory
He wasn’t with us on the Vam Co Tay

When We Were Sailors - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

When We Were Sailors

To the tune of Detroit Diesels

When we were sailors we seldom thought about
Being sailors. We thought about, well, girls
And happenin’ tunes from AFVN
‘Way down the river in happenin’ Saigon

We thought about cars and beaches and girls
And would a swing ship bring any mail today
In big red nylon sacks of envelopes
Love postmarked in a fantasy, The World

We thought about autumn and home and girls
While sandbag stacking and C-Rat snacking
We thought about being clean and dry again
While pooping and snooping in Cambodia

When we were sailors we thought about our pals
And what they were, and who
                                                   before the dust-offs flew

"Have You Seen Ken Burns' Latest Television Show?" - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

"Have You Seen Ken Burns’ Latest Television Show?"

No, I was in the play. I didn’t like it.
The plot, setting, and characterization
Were all wrong, and the clumsy denouement
Was poorly written and acted.
                                                   “Macbeth.”

War profiteers from John Wayne to Ken Burns
Have claimed my illegal war for their own
"Hell hath no fury like a non-combatant"
Beyond that, the VA is ashamed of me

So, thanks, but no. I'm good. Bitter, but good
For I was in the play. I didn’t like it.

The Bishop of DaNang - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

The Bishop of DaNang

In Grateful Memory:

Pierre Marie Pham Ngoc Chi,14 May 1909 – 21 January 1988

What did he think of his Americans
Some six or so, just kids, in jungle greens
Receiving from his hands the Sacrament
Of Confirmation there, among Marines

A Quonset hut chapel in the morning sun
Blistering the steel in its passage to noon
Anointing all with gun oil and with sweat
“Do you reject Satan and all his works…?”

The Word and his blessings, a group picture -
And what did the NVA think of him?

Hey, Nice Little Suitcase You Got Here. Hate to See Anything Happen to It.

Mack Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

Hey, Nice Little Suitcase You Got Here. 

Hate to See Anything Happen to It.

 

“This is disinfectant.  Use it.”

 

-Train Guard in Doctor Zhivago

 

When George Custer and I left Viet-Nam (poor George got into some fracas in the Dakotas later on), every departing passenger was required to go to confession before being subject to a pat-down.

 

The confessional was a little walk-through closet curtained on both ends.  The sign advised the passenger that if he was carrying home instruments of destruction for later use to repent of any such idea and in the privacy of the closet leave the things-that-go-boom in a little box provided for them.

 

My seatmate, a fellow named Wellington (he later visited Belgium and designed boots or something), was much amused when I told him that out of curiosity I had peeked into the box and had seen pistols, .50-cal machine-gun rounds, bayonets, knuckle-dusters, and a couple of hand grenades.

 

Lo these fifty years later no such courtesy or privacy is extended to airline passengers: unhappy people of the sort our mothers warned us against touch us in ways once regarded as inappropriate outside the bonds of wedlock. 

 

As for your toothbrush and spare socks, at Los Angeles International Airport, familiarly known as LAX(ative), there is no need to leave things in a little box for others to take away; the baggage smashers will go into your old Samsonite and decided for themselves which of your earthly goods they will endow themselves with.

 

Passengers, by order of Higher Authority, must not / may not / will not secure their bags except with a TSA-approved lock to which everyone in Christendom, Cathay, and Cucamonga has a key. 

 

Last week the Los Angeles police and the airport police (everyone has a police force these days; thinking of getting one myself) arrested a number of workers for liberating the people’s goods from the Belly of the Beast.  Apparently this criminal gang / activist group is an ongoing problem for LAX(ative), and like Captain Reynaud’s Casablanca Police Department the local authorities make a few arrests every now and then, claim to be shocked, shocked that there is pilfering  going on, and then steal Sam’s piano.

 

In Casablanca the response to a crime is “Round up the usual suspects.”  In an American airport the response is “Certain measures have been implemented…” broadcast over and over from Big Brother’s overhead speakers. 

 

When the unhappy people (maybe it’s the polyester uniforms) hired to paw through your stuff paw through your stuff, they ask “Did anyone else help pack your suitcase?”

 

And then lower down in one of the circles of (Newark) others who are not hired to paw through your stuff paw through your stuff, they help you unpack your suitcase before you even board the plane.

 

This is why the airline charges you to check your bag.

 

The cleaners, loaders, and security at American airports, unlike the paying passengers, are not inspected, not checked, not watched, and not regulated. What is to prevent some resentful son of toil from accepting a nice gift in a fat envelope in exchange for placing another fat envelope in your luggage?

 

When the Agency for Something Or Other reconstructs the accident and analyzes fragments of your suitcase, they can then tell your survivors that “Hey, your old daddy took a bomb on board.  What did you know about this?  We’re going to seize – um, sequester – all your property, and, hey, have you visited Guantanamo this time of year?  They say it’s lovely.”

 

While the Los Angeles police are investigating the LAX(ative) Chapter of the Comradely Brotherhood of This and That Oppressed Workers International, perhaps Captain Reynaud could ask them if they know where your lost youth is.  They may have pinched that too.

 

-30-

Peter, Paul, and Mary Reconsidered

Mack Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

Peter, Paul, and Mary Reconsidered

In a re-sale shop in Jasper, Texas y’r ‘umble scrivener found a CD (a format now as dated as vinyl and electromagnetic tape) for a dollar, and crunched it into the player in his heritage (translation: old) car (because the machine makes a crunching sound when it eats music).

Magic!

Peter, Paul, and Mary, the group’s eponymous 1962 album, and their first, was issued on LP vinyl, which, like pay telephones, passenger trains, typewriters, and Kodak cameras, will require some exposition for those who aren’t card-carrying Medicare-istas.

The oeuvre might perhaps be labeled as folk, but while that style quickly deteriorated into hootenanny-ness, PP&M were never follow-the-fashions derivative. Neither are their songs self-indulgent therapies about themselves and their feelings; their songs are about work, play, justice, childhood, and beauty.

The songs of Peter Yarrow, Paul Stookey, and Mary Travers were only part of the background top-forty a.m. music of your scrivener’s youth, but to his now mature ear they are perfection. The months of rehearsals are evident in the professionalism and cleanness of the performances. PP&M need no gimmicks, echo chambers, or layers of tracking; as true musicians they respect their audience and never lapse into curious noises.

The guitar has become a cliche' of folkabilly, casually slung over the shoulder of yet another 30-something hat-act posing mournfully on railroad tracks for a black-and-white publicity photograph, but the reality is that the legions of three-chord-commandos twanging wires are more annoying than musical. And, really, does anyone really stand on railroad tracks except for high school graduation pictures? Peter and Paul, though, respect the guitar, know the guitar, and rehearse the guitar. In a time when one often suspects that guitar is only a French word for kindling, PP&M remind us that there really are people who know that it is a musical instrument of great sophistication and potential, not an accessory.

And Mary - that voice! Crystalline! The notes to the album describe her, in language that would now be censored for its isms, “a bright, young blonde-and-a-half.” Oh, yeah. Mary never performed in her skivvies or mated with an amplifier; she didn’t have to.

The convention at this point in a narrative is to lapse into filler-language about how people could really sing and play music Back in the Day, but that is nonsense, of course. There are always professional artists who play music worthy of their audiences. There are not always audiences worthy of the artists.

Some criticism of the trio is valid – they allowed themselves to be used for propaganda, and Paul Stookey could be convicted of cultural manslaughter for the powder-blue-tux oozings of “The Wedding Song.” But when the organizers no longer needed Peter, Paul, and Mary, they were discarded as irrelevant and uncool. Their cosmic payback was “I Dig Rock and Roll Music,” which subtly mocked the pretensions of acts which had little to offer but junior-high locker-room language and look-at-me-me-me-ness.

Once upon a time, but definitely not in The Land of Honalee, a pal propped his dinky little transistor radio on some sandbags. The machine’s brave little 9-volt battery and its two-inch speaker, punching below its weight, were pushing out "500 Miles from Home" as broadcast from AFVN Saigon. The Chief didn’t like it, but then we didn’t like him. And, anyway, being 12,000 miles from home will get to you, too.

The gratitude is a little late, but thanks for that moment, Peter, Paul, and Mary.

-30-

The Sky to Moc Hoa

Mack Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com

The Sky to Moc Hoa

The sky to Moc Hoa is hazily blue,
Layered between Heaven and heat. The damp
Rots even the air with the menace of death.
The ground below, all green and holed, dies too;

It seems to gasp: You will not live, young lad,
You will not live to read your books or dream
About a little room, a fire, a pipe,
A chair, a pen, a dog, a truth-told poem
Flung courteously in manuscript pages
Upon a coffee-stained table, halo’d
In a 60-watt puddle of lamp-light.

You skinny, stupid kid. You will not live.

Then circling, and circling again, again,
Searching, perhaps, for festive rotting meals,
Down-spinning, fear-spinning onto Moc Hoa,
Palm trees, iron roofs, spinning in a dead sun,
Spinning up to a swing-ship spinning down.
A square of iron matting in a green marsh,
Hot, green, wet, fetid with old Samsara.

Gunboats diesel across the Van Co Tay,
Little green gunboats, red nylon mail sacks,
Engines, cheery yells, sloshing mud, heat, rot.
Mail sacks off, mail sacks on, men off, men on,
Dark blades beating against the heavy heat,
The door gunners, the pilot impatient.
All clear to lift, heads down, humans crouching
Ape-like against the grass, against the slime
In sweating, stinking, slinking, feral fear
As the dragon-blades roar and finally fly,
And the beaten grass and beaten men
Now stand again erect in gasping heat,
Some silent in a new and fearful world.

You will not live, young hero; you will die.
What then of Dostoyevsky and Chekhov?
What then of your Modern Library editions,
A dollar each at the Stars & Stripes store
Far away and long ago in DaNang,
All marked and underlined? What is the point?
What then of your notebook scribbled with words,
Your weak attempts at poetry? So sad,
So irrelevant in the nights of death.
The corpses on the gunboat decks won’t care,
Their flare-lit faces staring into smoke
At 0-Two-Damned Thirty in the morning –
Of what truth or beauty are your words to them?

You haven’t any words anyway;
They’re out of movies and books, all of them.
What truth can adventure-story words speak
To corpses with their eyes eaten away?

Write your used emotions onto a page;
You haven’t any emotions anyway;
They’re out of the past, all of them.
What truth can used emotions speak to death?

So sling your useless gear aboard the boat:
A seabag of utilities, clean socks,
Letters, a pocket knife, a Rosary,
Some underwear, some dreams, and lots of books.

And board yourself. Try not to fall, to drown,
To be a floating, bloating, eyeless face.
Not yet. Think of your books, your words. Look up:
The sky to Moc Hoa is hazily blue.

Notes:

1. Moc Hoa, pronounced Mock Wah -- a town on the Vam Co Tay River near the border with Cambodia.

2. “Young lad” or “lad” – employed sarcastically of recruits by chief petty officers.

3. “Young hero” – employed sarcastically of recruits by chief petty officers and of Navy Corpsman in Field Medical Service School by Marine sergeant-instructors.

4. Utilities – heavy, olive-drab, 1950s style Marine Corps battle-dress issued to Navy personnel on their way to Viet-Nam. Too darned hot. I had to scrounge lighter clothing from which the blood never completely washed out.

5. Samsara – in some Eastern religions, Samsara is the ocean of birth and death.

6. Gunboats – here, PBRs, or Patrol Boat, River. The history and characteristics of this excellent craft and its use in river warfare are well documented.

Russians in Moc Hoa

I read lots of Russian lit (in translation, of course) while in Viet-Nam

Mack Hall, HSG
mhall46184@aol.com

Russians in Moc Hoa

I understood poor, young Raskolnikov
And read all I found by Anton Chekhov
Remembered nothing about Bulgakhov
Heard naughty whispers about Nabokov
Thrilled to the Cossacks in old Sholokov
And then I learned about Kalashnikov –
This, I decided, is where I get off!

Christmas Among the Sandbags

Mack Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com

Christmas Among the Sandbags

An old Navy buddy telephoned me for Christmas, and we marched down memory grinder to long-ago days in San Diego.

Mike and I were in boot camp together for four months, real boot camp, not the Barbie-therapy thing for petting the misunderstood youths who stole your car, and then Hospital Corps ‘A’ School for another four or so months. On the day we graduated from ‘A’ school all of us new Corpsmen were loaded into three trailers and trucked to Camp Pendleton for a month of Field Medical Service School. Upon arrival we were given a jolly greeting by Sergeant Snyder, who had us sit in groups of four for a little comforting this-ain’t-no-S-word advice: he told us to look at the other three, and said that within a year one of the four would not be alive.

A civilian teacher never has to tell his students that their mortality rate by the end of next term will be 25%.

Most of us who later found ourselves up and down small rivers on small boats survived; far more of those who patrolled with the Marines died violently because men in Washington all clean and dry in white shirts and expensive suits thought the deaths of 19-year-olds was somehow a good idea.

They still do.

After Field Medical Service School, orders took Mike and me different ways, as orders do, but those intense months still inform our lives as nothing else could. One hears drivel about a stupid song or a stupid concert or a stupid celebrity “defining a generation,” but anyone so weak and so facile as to believe that deserves to be defined. During Woodstock a few of us on the other side of the world were also camped out in the woods and fields; our campout didn’t define us and we still refuse to be defined.

But this is a Christmas story, so let us put out the cigarettes and get to our feet: in our first Christmas in the Navy Mike and I and 97 other guys were still in ‘A’ School but were given the day off. We were all homesick, but there was nothing for it. Mike-the-Lutheran, Bill-the-Catholic, and I got up early, even though for once we didn’t have to – and that annoying, scratchy record of “Reveille” blasting through speakers on other mornings was happily silent for Christmas - and on a cool, misty morning walked down the hill and into town for early Mass at St. Joseph’s Cathedral.

And that was good, because not many of the guys in Viet-Nam would have had a Christmas morning service of any kind.

After Mass we found a hole-in-the-wall café’ with cookery-steamy plate-glass windows and enjoyed a leisurely breakfast.

And that was good, because not any of the guys in Viet-Nam would have had fresh eggs and fresh milk on Christmas morning; a great many of them had to feast out of a can.

And then we walked for hours in Balboa Park – at $96 a month you find the free entertainment - and the mist blew out to sea and the sun came out.

And that was very good, because there was no fear of land mines buried in the grass in the park.

And because our expectations had been very low, that Christmas was a very happy one indeed. Christmas is where you find it.

And, anyway, my father spent the Christmas of 1944 in the snow outside Bastogne; San Diego was a much better deal.

This Christmas we pray – and we must really do so, not just say the words carelessly - for our young men and women in the desert. Some of them are Marines and Navy Corpsmen (the desert Corpsmen who survive will, again, come home to be told by the ill-informed how lucky they were to have been on a ship and away from the fighting). Some of America’s best will be close enough to an airfield to enjoy a real Christmas meal shipped in (if the lovers of peace out among the rocks don’t blow up the plane or helicopter); others will spoon mysterious glop from a can or pouch with a little sand, smoke, and gun oil for dressing, and maybe the downwind stench from the latrines to serve as the odor of sanctity.

Other postings and operations and ships around the world are a little safer than patrolling in the danger, dung, and dirt of Whosedumbideawasthisstan this Christmas, but those assignments are no less lonely for young soldiers away from home for the first time and for older soldiers away from home yet again. A 19-year-old from Minnesota standing the mid-watch won’t find Christmas in Fort Hood to be very Normal Rockwell-ish, and another 19-year-old posted to some air base on the Arctic Circle might not be able to spare a moment to appreciate the full Christmas moon while de-icing a jet about to launch. Other 19-year-olds deep inside an on-station submarine that won’t surface for three months can’t look at the moon or even listen to the radio.

But Christmas is where you find it, and we can expect that our innovative youth will somehow find a way of making the most of it, some by sharing their Christmas meal with children who are programmed to hate them. Certain events 2,000 years ago also began in a cold desert with two young people far away from home because of government orders, and that eventually worked out fine.

God bless our sailors, Marines, soldiers, Coast Guard, and airmen everywhere this Christmas.

-30-

The Second-Hand Thousand-Yard Stare

Mack Hall

The Second-Hand Thousand-Yard Stare

or

The Doggerels of War

Dedicated to the Liars and The Saps Who Believe Them

Tell me ‘bout the action I never saw;
You heard it all from your brother-in-law,
Knowing from his tales that I wasn’t there:
The same old, second-hand, thousand-yard stare

Tell me ‘bout the river, the Vam Co Tay,
Your uncle or cousin, the Green Beret,
The man who’s seen it all, bullets through the air:
The same old, second-hand, thousand-yard stare

Tell me ‘bout the guys living ‘neath a bridge
Who lost their souls – they say – on some grim ridge,
And you believe their yarns bizarre and rare:
The same old, second-hand, thousand-yard stare

Tell me ‘bout your buddy, the Navy Seal
Who tells you all for a beer and a meal
Killed a thousand Cong with his steely glare:
The same old, second-hand, thousand-yard stare

Tell me ‘bout the heroes silent and strong;
They seem to talk to you, though, all night long,
By gosh, you’re special, and you want to share
The same old, second-hand, thousand-yard stare

You got no closer than a movie show
To Viet-Nam, but gosh you sure do know
All about war, and tell it with such flair:
The same old, second-hand, thousand-yard stare

The poor truth is -- real vets are such a bore,
A barber, plumber, or clerk in a store
But you believe the studs who preen and swear:
‘Nother damn, hand-me-down, thousand-yard stare

Well --

I ain’t no special nothin’; I’m just a man
Who knows a little bit of the lay of the land
Along the Cambodian border where
I never heard of a thousand-yard stare.

The Sky to Moc Hoa

Mack Hall

The Sky to Moc Hoa

The sky to Moc Hoa is hazily blue,
Layered between heat and Heaven. The damp
Rots even the air with the menace of death.
The ground below, all green and holed, dies too;

It seems to gasp: You will not live, young lad,
You will not live to read your books or dream
About a little room, a fire, a pipe,
A chair, a pen, a dog, a truth-told poem
Flung courteously in manuscript pages
Upon a coffee-stained table, halo’d
In a 60-watt puddle of lamp-light.

You skinny, stupid kid. You will not live.

Then circling, and circling again, again,
Searching, perhaps, for festive rotting meals,
Down-spinning, fear-spinning onto Moc Hoa,
Palm trees, iron roofs, spinning in a dead sun,
Spinning up to a swing-ship spinning down.
A square of iron matting in a green marsh,
Hot, green, wet, fetid with old Samsara.

Gunboats diesel across the Van Co Tay,
Little green gunboats, red nylon mail sacks,
Engines, cheery yells, sloshing mud, heat, rot.
Mail sacks off, mail sacks on, men off, men on,
Dark blades beating against the heavy heat,
The door gunners, the pilot impatient.
All clear to lift, heads down, humans crouching
Ape-like against the grass, against the slime
In sweating, stinking, slinking, feral fear
As the dragon-blades roar and finally fly,
And the beaten grass and beaten men
Now stand again erect in gasping heat,
Some silent in a new and fearful world.

You will not live, young hero; you will die.

What then of Dostoyevsky and Chekhov?
What then of your Modern Library editions,
A dollar each at the Stars & Stripes store
Far away and long ago in DaNang,
All marked and underlined? What is the point?
What then of your notebook scribbled with words,
Your weak attempts at poetry? So sad,
So irrelevant in the nights of death.
The corpses on the gunboat decks won’t care,
Their flare-lit faces staring into smoke
At 0-Two-Damned Thirty in the morning –
Of what truth or beauty are your words to them?

You haven’t any words anyway;
They’re out of movies and books, all of them.
What truth can adventure-story words speak
To corpses with their eyes eaten away?

Write your used emotions onto a page;
You haven’t any emotions anyway;
They’re out of the past, all of them.
What truth can used emotions speak to death?

So sling your useless gear aboard the boat:
A seabag of utilities, clean socks,
Letters, a pocket knife, a Rosary,
Some underwear, some dreams, and lots of books.

And board yourself. Try not to fall, to drown,
To be a floating bloating, eyeless face.Not yet.
Think of your books, your words. Look up:
The sky to Moc Hoa is hazily blue.

Notes:

1. Moc Hoa, pronounced Mock Wah -- a town on the Vam Co Tay River near the border with Cambodia.

2. “Young lad” or “lad” – employed sarcastically of recruits by chief petty officers.

3. “Young hero” – employed sarcastically of recruits by chief petty officers and of Navy Corpsman in Field Medical Service School by Marine sergeant-instructors.

4. Utilities – heavy, olive-drab, 1950s style Marine Corps battle-dress issued to Navy personnel on their way to Viet-Nam. Too darned hot. I had to scrounge lighter clothing.

5. Samsara – in some Eastern religions the ocean of birth and death.

6. Gunboats – here, PBRs, or Patrol Boat, River. The history of this excellent craft and its use in river warfare is well documented.

7. Stars and Stripes store – more accurately, any one of the chain of Pacific Stars and Stripes book stores.

8. Swing ship – a helicopter, in my experience always the famous Huey, employed for carrying supplies and personnel on routine routes. The pilots sometimes spun them in very fast in order to try to avoid ground fire.

9. Seabag – duffel bag.

10. Skinny kid – most of us were.

Russians in Moc Hoa

I read lots of Russian lit (in translation, of course) while in Viet-Nam

Mack Hall

Russians in Moc Hoa

I understood poor, young Raskolnikov
And read all I found by Anton Chekhov
Remembered nothing about Bulgakhov
Heard naughty whispers about Nabokov
Thrilled to the Cossacks in old Sholokov
And then I learned about Kalashnikov –
This, I decided, is where I get off!