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With Apologies to Lincoln and JFK

By Mike Gehl

On those warm Southeast Asian nights
we loved the colors of the firefights.
"The better angels of our nature" might
alert us to something not quite right
beyond perimeter, bracketed, out of sight.

Ordered not to think of distant carnage,
told not to feel what was real:
rumors, tremors, tracers and C-rats,
attitudes of lifers, my soul's on the line.
Mantra: "It don't mean nothin.'"
(10 days and a wake-up.)

But the colors blew our minds!
It's unholy to love this stuff, right?
We ask not what we did for our country
but what our country
did to us.

Mike Gehl