'We Toasted Him'

R.L. Barth, a Marine Corps veteran of the Vietnam War, has written a new poem, “Exercise”: 

“The chopper landed; in full combat gear

We loaded single file to practice rappelling

Into a jungle lacking an LZ.

The exercise aborted when a cherry,

Some private with a couple weeks in-country,

Lost his grip and, turtle-like, free fell

Strapped to a rucksack filled with radio,

Frags, willie peter, loaded magazines,

Long rations, C-4, flares, and sleeping bag.

He broke his back, and we, with a reprieve

From training on our time out of the bush,

Took to the E-M club. We toasted him.”

 

Some annotations: “LZ” is landing zone. “Cherry” is a new guy. “Frags” are fragmentation grenades. “Willie peter” refers to white phosphorous grenades. “Long rations” are freeze-dried field rations. “C-4” is a plastic explosive. “E-M club” is a bar for enlisted men.

 

Bob’s poem has a documentary feel until the final lines, when the grimly pragmatic humor of men in combat takes over. The exercise is cancelled when the private is injured. Time to celebrate.

 

And this, from an earlier war. After graduating from Harvard in 1941, Howard Nemerov flew fifty combat missions with the Royal Canadian Air Force as a fighter pilot and another fifty-seven with the Eighth U.S. Army Air Force. “Night Operations, Coastal Command RAF” (War Stories: Poems About Long Ago and Now, 1987) describes even more wartime accidents:

“Remembering the war, I’d near believe

We didn’t need the enemy, with whom

Our dark encounters were confused and few

And quickly done, so many of our lot

Did for themselves in folly and misfortune.

 

“Some hit our own barrage balloons, and some

Tripped over power lines, coming in low;

Some swung on takeoff, others overshot,

And two or three forget to lower the wheels.

 

“There were those that flew the bearing for the course

And flew away forever: and the happy few

That homed on Venus sinking beyond the sea

In fading certitude. For all the skill,

For all the time of training, you might take

The hundred steps in darkness, not the next.”