Damn!

I’ve done it again!

Another damned tear has leaked from my eye and run down my wrinkled cheek.

It doesn’t happen often, just whenever the rest of the world makes me remember!

Making me remember dead friends and relatives from the days of my youth

Oh, I served, but I never was In Country!

Even the Asshole, George Bush said my service was second rate,

when he denied me and my kind our benefits.

You know, my kind, those who kept our war machine running

but weren’t actually wounded or even shot at.

Oh, I know, it was a necessary way for our country to save money,

They said they had to cut the benefits they promised us all

by having the politicians add a long list of reasons to exclude us.

But What the Hell!

They can keep their damned pills and bandages and worn out Doctors,

and whatever else I might need in the future.

I know that I served and I know they took years of my life.

So Screw George Bush

and all of his Ass-Kissing political partners in Crime.

You See, one day, their souls will go to their own

special Hell, when they die!

My problem is the memories of my old buddies that I grew up with.

along with my cousins and uncles.

all of whom served when our nation called.

You don’t know them, yourself.

They died over there; in a helicopter, on a booby-trapped road,

in an unarmored patrol boat, or crouched in a stinking jungle ditch.

Sure, all of them didn’t die over there,

some came back with missing pieces of their young bodies

still ground into the mud of the jungle where they were wounded.

And when they came back, they looked OK, at first glance.

That is, until you looked closely into their eyes over a beer one night

and saw the fear and insanity being held back

by the flimsy bars of a willpower overly tested.

Bars that were bound to break, sooner or later.

Some just drank too much, and some just wanted to be left alone.

My best buddy, Butch, just drove his chopped Triumph

into an embankment on a lonely road, one summers night.

A cousin, untrained, was give the job of bagging body parts

eight and ten hours a day, for over two years.

He wasn’t wounded himself, there was no bullet scar on him,

he just didn’t sleep anymore, without drugs, for years.

My personal list is long, and now they’re long gone,

even most of the ones who came back.

I understand.

But that damned tear keeps slipping from my eye.

every time you make me remember.

Who do I curse for that? Just who the hell do i blame for that?

What the Hell!  After we all die off, someone else can write their own book about us, the wounded; physically, mentally and morally, from that time of war.

by Don Bobbitt, May, 2014

Copyright, Don Bobbitt, May, 2014, All Rights Reserved. You are free to enjoy and share this article with your friends and others, but if you wish to use it commercially, you must have the authors permission, in writing.