Cleveland, Spring, 1969.

It wasn’t post 9/11; he could

“Walk right in, sit right down

Daddy, let your mind roll on,”

at the Veterans’ Hospital, though

he didn’t sit down. He roamed

floor to floor, ward to ward.

He doesn’t remember rooms.

Twenty-four, a seminarian,

following a different call from

the soldiers who were sent to

avenge the bombing in the

Tonkin Gulf that never happen-

ed; they didn’t know that. He

protested the war in Vietnam,

but not Korea, being too young,

but he saw veterans from that war,

too and a few from WWII, too.

But mostly eighteen and nineteen

year olds who left body parts in

some swamp in Southeast Asia

who sat in wheelchairs or lay in

beds covered in sweat soaked

sheets and blood stains. Scruffy

bearded boys smoking their lungs

out in gunboat gray walled wards with chipped

paint bed frames, aluminum bedpans

and half full portable urinals hanging from

bed frames. Some sat in

wheelchairs staring blankly ahead

waiting for their diaper to be changed,

calling out meekly or screaming

bloody murder for an orderly.

Some sat by windows watching

spring rain, budding trees, grass soon

to need mowing and cars parked by

the curb. Were they thinking about

home, mom, sis, the dog? Maybe

it was best not to think of home, a

place from which they escaped in the first

place; maybe they thought of driving

one of those curbed cars somewhere,

anywhere but where they were or may-

be eventually they would be like the

old men pushing themselves around

or hobbling around wards and floors

for years, men who left body parts

in Korea, France, Germany or may-

be, just maybe, if they were lucky,

real lucky, the place that always and

ever beckons, Rodgers and Hammer-

stein’s Bali Hai just after they kissed

Liat, Bloody Mary’s beautiful

daughter.