Written by David Edwards

NOTE:  I returned from Vietnam with baggage I didn’t take there. I had no full awareness of it until decades later, whereupon I wrote this anger poem, which was in some measure cathartic.  I most felt its impact reading it aloud and deliberately with a wounded soul.

CONTROLLING THE FIRE:  LIFETIME ANGER MANAGEMENT

 THEN a good soldier at twenty I went whole where you ordered and did what you told me to do for a year and came home, heart cracked and bleeding for a beautiful people who wanted peace but were paying exorbitant taxes on a scrap between you and Ho which should have been settled by gentle men but instead became a grapple to see who would be king of the mountain for a day or so. While you played Sisyphus, lives that counted were being pounded into the earth, many into their own and brothers into a foreign one.  Once having done my dastardly bastardly duty I came back with a newfound madness and anger at the blowing wind to a hostile home, a place I left to happy-horn Herb Alpert but returned to bold-bugle Barry McGuire sounding out destruction, a madder place and angrier at me than I could know while in the Reds’ rockets’ glare with shrapnel spinning in air seeking me out.  It was you, Lyndon, who merited the many missiles of spittle we, the ordered, sustained on your behalf, and equally the bullets you ordered for Jack, who planned to preclude the journey you sent me on and intended to quit your second-term mission to his succession.  Dwight had forewarned us of you and your friends, the military-industrial complex glued together by the kind of politics you embraced and fostered while Woodstock and Haight-Ashbury rolled a different stone in heads, the sort that grew from pebbles into one bigger than yours.  Harry had quickly washed his hands with the charcoaled atoms of a proud people, but you chose to lather us with the slow soap of body-count accounting, laundering the books with the myth of Tonkin and the promise of a better world, one that you never delivered, a vow which netted nothing from a gross loss.  Then expletive-deleted Richard came along and at least got us the hell out of that hell but then impelled us into a new room in that manifold mansion where deceit is falsely painted white THERE.

 NOW fifty years on from ground zero the explosions of anger have not died out but are managed by the life sentence of un-paroled imprisonment locked away under the thick skin of necessity.  No comfort, but a curse, I recognize my fellows with inmate intimacy, whether low on homeless streets of despair or high in marbled towers of prosperity.  Like an invisible code on their foreheads there for my scanning, their living ghosts whisper of familiar farms bought far away, which first appeared as rice paddies to quicken people but then ended up only starving them into oblivion by the pestilent bullets that ate into their flesh like a violent carcinoma spreading poison quickly to their quick.  We unwillingly live with this lingering daily death, though not with a constant consciousness.  It seethes subcutaneously with wildly variable temperatures, but we always feel it there, often with numbed scar tissue and sometimes with tender lachrymal response.  Our souls were napalmed and agent-oranged in that small space for that short span, and the tendrils of those implantations punched holes in our lives, limping little mollified through all the rages of our roads to the places we now reside.  Toxins still spill from our pores but only in measured volumes to preserve humanity.  We have become war-to-grave managers of a parasitic hitchhiker we unknowingly picked up on a side road to our highway, a leech that seeks to bleed us of the life we desperately try to preserve to a peaceful end.  If we are successful, we keep private a beast that lives to gain generalship of all we count precious.  Lives lost, loves lost, families lost, fortunes lost, aspirations lost, minds lost, all in a holocaust of war-ignited costs have issued from this internal infernal adversary that defies both excision and exorcism and but scarcely abides containment.  But Lyndon, the chaos of my anger is the least of your concerns in your new country and is left to me to manage HERE.