The Siege of Khe Sanh

North Vietnamese Army artillery
fell
seventy-seven days
within their lines,
ears pained loud
and shrapnel opened men,
while
trench lines of enemy troops
waited
to overrun them,
only
a stone's throw away.

Rifles
and machine guns
pointed into blackness,
waited for the enemy to come,
then red tracers,
back
and forth,
all around them,
loud through the solid dark.
Flares
parachuted the night
into day.

Words Not Available

Automatic weapons fired from nowhere,
lifted him,
threw him on his back,
he couldn't move.
A friend held a compress tight,
blood
on both of them,
they stared into each other's eyes.

He kept a steady job,
paid
all his bills on time,
nice to his wife,
played with the kids.
But every night in his sleep
he trembled,
covered with a sticky sweat.

When the emotions
of war
finally started to slow down inside him
he
sold his guns,
and then soon after that he began
to forgive
all the people who had ever
done him
wrong,
and he prayed for each of them
daily.
The next Spring
he went into his backyard
for the first time
in twenty-five
years
and
planted a garden.
He grew tomatoes and gave them away
to
everyone.