Dayle Wise; First CAV Recon, '70, Vietnam

Dayle Wise; First CAV Recon, ’70, Vietnam
joanna vogel

“People shot at me, I shot at them.”

1.
Now he is an activist,
a poet with a limp
and long hair.
He paces in a blazer and dungarees,
pauses at length, mid-sentence;
wonders which word to use
to describe which image.

2.
“ We were being picked up in the fall,
the fall of nineteen
seventy.
We were running to the helicopter
and we cut through a house
full of women and children
(no men)
because we could do that;
we carried M-16’s.
And this little girl
got in my face,
just planted herself there
and looked at me.
My knees went weak and I almost
went down.
I have thought about her
every day
for the past
thirty years.

3.
At nineteen
he was a scrawny sergeant,
placed, by mistake, amid the vehement
decades—
in command of a “black unit”.

4.
“To get respect,
the lieutenant suggested I start chewing tobacco,
a disgusting thing to do.
So I used to chew tobacco and spit
on people’s shoes.
I was a bastard.”

5.
In the nineteen
nineties, he went back
“in country”
to “deliver medical supplies in the form
of reconciliation.”
A bomb had gone off
and this man,
who had only ever hunted people,
sat with men like himself; missing pieces.
Only, they were missing hunks of skull,
of flesh,
and he could not see
their souls,
only his own,
pierced too many times over
by every bullet spit,
while he shot
photographs
with his eyes closed.

6.
“I don’t remember nineteen sixty-nine”
his friend Bill says.
He is missing this year of memory,
and many more of life.

7.
Dayle is afraid of himself,
of his anger.
He resents,
rejects whole pieces of himself:
they should not be there,
they do not have the right to be there.
But he is missing so much more than that
space of anger
could possibly swallow.
How can he decide to
discontinue
anymore?
Large pieces have been lost,
they are lying in the hollow spaces
of buried bullet shells,
in spilt blood that has been drunk up
by tree roots.
They are sleeping
nestled next to decomposed
bodies, in coffins of rotted wood.
They are suffocated,
stuffed underground,
in country,
in Cambodia,
in Vietnam.

8.
“I didn’t say anything.
I just let it happen to me.
I just let the pieces fall where they would.”
Like hundreds of tiny bombs that are dropped
and don’t explode
for thirty years.
“I just let the pieces fall.”