SOLDIERS: Poem: "Hero's Grave"

For The Herald Bulletin

May 17, 2008 10:16 pm

— The following is an excerpt from a poem written by Larry Wiesenauer, a Vietnam veteran suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.
Hero’s Grave
Psychologists think too much of their craft.
Playing mind gods they vainly, clinically sort among the gore,
Seeking to grow sanity in minds I know are destroyed.
Teach a young man loyalty, honor, duty,
You have a patriot.
Teach him to kill
You have a killer.
One doesn’t need fixing...the other you can’t fix.
Like an accountant trying to balance books
And finally deciding to erase the ledger.
They play the songs of therapy till the tune wears out.
1200 milligrams of thorazine
Eight pills a day I am back in rhyme with all of mankind.
Used to be, get my Squad thru three days, killing with out being killed.
Incoming ... Rockets—-Kenny blew by me like a rag doll.
Yellow flare up … F-111 striking … everything burning.
Corpsman Funkhouser and I held Kenny down in the mud.
Till the napalm burnt out and we could evacuate the area.
Funkhouser got the bleeding stopped, we carried Kenny for seventeen hours.
Shakespeare said “he who has shed his blood with me this day
Is forever my brother.”
True then, true now, true later in the Black Granite Wall.
Dead or alive Kenny was coming out with us.
Didn’t always work out that way … Men’s faces are faded,
can’t remember names,
Eight pills a day ... spend each day in dreams of dreams.
The next day there were twelve pills.
Can’t focus, can’t remember very well.
Daily goal at group therapy clean yourself well.
You will have more friends if you don’t smell.
12 pills a day ... doing the thorazine shuffle.
Waiting on their Hero’s grave.