Poems submitted by Thomas Brinson, long time VFP member & former Board of Director member.
Memorial Day - 1986
The rain cascades down from grey banks of clouds that hover over the village square. Appropriate I think, futilely holding a wind-battered umbrella over six-year old son and myself.
A meager turn out of campaign-hatted old WW II and Korean vets stand with their devoted auxiliary women steadfast beside them. A scattering of other curious by-standers also look on.
They murmur, nodding solemn heads in unison, as patriotic sound-bites from politicians
wax rhetorically over static-filled loudspeakers. A squad of full-dress uniformed Marines
form a spit-shined honor guard. They sight along M-16s solemnly raised skyward.
Taps echo somber throughout the crowd.Grizzled old veterans become ramrod straight and salute. A sharp report of rifle fire follows the command of “Ready. Aim. Fire.”
Feeling out of place in Nike running shoes and Vietnam Veterans Against War t-shirt, I can’t answer my young son’s fevered queries: “Why do the soldiers have guns, Daddy?”
“Who are they shooting at, Daddy? “Daddy, please Daddy, can I shoot one, too?”
As the rain-limped red, white & blue lowers, I nervously shift from foot to foot, trying to quell the queries of my insistent son, wonder why tears stream down my face, mirroring the rain around us, want to hug so tightly — like her adolescent grandson — the Gold Star Mother, who shivers so and also sobs.
Memorial Day, 1986
Islip Hamlet, NY
At The Wall, Memorial Day, 1998
A glorious, short-sleeve day to be walking on the grand Mall with the Capitol looming behind us. We pass the elegantly Victorian Smithsonian, the national museums and galleries and the phallically sharp-pointed Washington Monument, sheathed with construction scaffolding. Our squiggly reflections are mirrored in the Reflecting Pools, as I lead my three-generational family squad towards The Wall.
Streaming towards and around us, are scattered gaggles of boisterous celebrants on their way home after the rousing rhetoric of Gore and the nostalgic harmonies of Crosby, Stills & Nash. There are hundreds of my peers, fellow veterans of our war’s long obscenity. Beer swilling, paunch-bellied, long gray-bearded and scraggly ponytailed, they stagger and lurch and shuffle their way on either side of us away from The Wall.
I think: Sweet Jesus, it’s been too long.It’s time to grow up and get on with it.The camies just don’t work anymore. We’re much too old to pretend we’re still the warriors most of us never were. My family and I reach the hallowed ground, stark memorial to the tragedy of my war’s too long roll call of KIAs, gray-etched in black stone — so young, too bloody, such waste.
I commune with grandson, Zachary Brian, about how I had been there and done that.
With deep, dark-blue-eyed, most serious demeanor, he silently asserts his knowing,
at six-months old, as I hold him close and tight, that he never has to go to war. His Mom, Rebecca, takes a couple of pictures; Jennifer, his Aunt, hugs us all; Dad Brian earnestly watches.
As we turn to go, I look back at the long, dark V-shape solemnly at rest in green-carpeted Washington soil. I think this is a good day to celebrate the full wonder of grateful living. This is the best way to honor those who died, following their destiny’s mysterious call.
May 25, 1998
Islip Hamlet, NY
The Wall --Memorial Day, 2001
Wee early morn hour. Sliver of new moon, a spike in the sky. Stars chips of dim light dart between wispy clouds. A good time under cover of shadows to place LPs beyond perimeter, or to stealthily move toward distant hostile objective.
Chutney and I move north across the empty Mall deep in shadow, ready for rhetorical festivities during daylight. A massive POW MIA banner hangs high overhead, lots of red white and blue bunting in place.
We come to the Women's Statue, valiant nurses in tortured poses of grace, tending our wounds, trying to soothe our hurts. Despite their terror and horror they offered us comfort, where little could be found.
I crouch out of habit, Chutney is solemn. We make our way through deep shadow to the three vets, who stare in psyched numbness over the dew-dropped field to the glistening, long, dark V, carved into the hillside with the names, all of the names of the fallen brothers and seven sisters. The names start with the very first one in ’58, through the floodgates during ’68-69 to a bare trickle until the very last one, just chiseled in the Wall this year, the name of the last paraplegic to prematurely die of his wounds from that now long ago war.
Chutney low-throat growls at the statue -- I soothingly pet him, salute my long ago comrades, let a tear slide down my cheek. I mourn our long lost youth, our long lost innocence. We were too young to be so burdened by so many sins of our arrogant species. We now also bear the mark of Cain forever within our psyches.
Reverently, we begin the long descent of name after name after name after name after name. Here and there I touch one, feel smooth texture, then rough texture of polished marble and cut stone, a calligraphy of death. I stop to touch an unknown brother, trying to discern his spirit, to bond with his unutterable loss, which I deeply feel, but cannot truly know.
After a long while, we slowly begin an ascent and the names slowly begin to dwindle, as we follow the slow winding down of our war. Chutney sniffs the new morning air. In the East, just barely, new light begins to gather -- I look back down the corridor of our testimonial to needless death. I wipe away a final tear. I salute a last salute. Chutney and I begin a new day of full living.
June 1, 2001
Islip Hamlet, NY
The Bone — Memorial Day, 2007
The festive crowd underneath a sea of umbrellas fills the beach and lines up all along the wide boardwalk for the Jones Beach Air Show. The area is filled with flag-festooned booths of vendors, hawking their genocidal wares: Army, Navy, Coast Guard, Marines National Guard and the mighty Air Force, amid an extravaganza of dazzling corporate displays.
In giddy exaltation, roars of approval from the crowd of 443,000 or so souls cheer each display of martial skill: Golden Knights parachuting, Navy Seals scuba diving, Special Ops repelling from black,-black Blackhawks.
BUT, the most solemn, neck-craning, mouth-open-slack, vacant-eyed adulation is reserved for a huge Air Force aeroplane that thunderously roars by — not once — nor twice — but thrice to the fevered commentary of an announcer, blaring from mega-decibel loudspeakers, accompanied by a rousing, bass-pounding rendition of “Bad to the Bone”:
“Yessiree, Ladies and Gentlemen, the B1B Bomber, aka the Bone, the backbone of America’s nuclear arsenal. Carries the largest payload of guided and unguided nuclear weaponry ever. More firepower than 200 WW II bombers. Look at that baby. Here it comes. Aren’t you proud to be an American on Memorial Day? There it goes!Doesn’t the sight of that thrill you? Listen to that roar. That’s the sound of freedom.”
Marching with a solemn little band of 40 or so Peacemakers marking the true meaning of Memorial Day, carrying a string of Code Pink ribbons, one for each
fallen American soldier in the Middle East wars, some 3,452 ever mounting, thinking of the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and Afghan civilians casually genocided, I am disgusted, saddened by memories of my quagmire forty years ago in jungle.
For comic relief to ward off a plunge into keening despair, I visualize scores -- nay, thousands of Raging Grannies, Code Pink ladies, Pax Christi nuns, Cindy Sheehanistas, and us aging gray-haired, pot-bellied Veterans for Peace falling down, writhing on the Boardwalk, gleefully moaning in frenzied ecstasies of simultaneous orgasms.
May 28, 2007
Long Beach, NY