Beau Coup Dinky Dau

image from blog.cwam.org

Beau Coup Dinky Dau

“Just don’t say dinky dau if you’ve never felt it, if you never

were in the heat or fear of battle.”--John Shearin.

For too many thousands of us,

      through conscription, stupidity, or misinformation,

             our war was in Viet Nam, where Charlie didn’t surf

                   & they wasn’t any fried chicken in the Delta, swarms

                   of us from the inner city, a few fresh & dumb right off

              the farm, every color, every temperament, the 

        original rainbow coalition combat squads, discovering

that although civil rights was still a cherry boy

in Biloxi & the Bronx, there was

               zip racism out there banded together in squads

                        trudging through the baleful boonies, where we

                               pulled fucking patrol after patrol, learning about

                                       the VC booby traps the hard way, finding our

                                             lost buddies dismembered, & their heads on

                                       a stake, their genitals sewed up into their

                                sad dead mouths, and shit, we got mad,

                           real fucking A dinky--dau crazy, and we

                       found ourselves burning villages, then we

                       slaughtered livestock, burned rice fields &

                       raped girls younger than our sisters, doing

hard drugs for the first time,

drinking beer barely cooled

in vats of jet fuel; we all found ourselves becoming brothers

                       in arms, in madness, & at liberty; reconstituting

                       our psyches, reshaping our morality, growing

                       dark & mean in places we no longer could feel;

only to ride the Freedom Birds back home,

to be greeted by screaming hippies & radicals

who yelled, “Baby-killers, murderers, stupid

brained washed pawns of the military,” and

god damn it, though we kicked their asses,

angry they got to stay here & become oh so

liberal, while we finished our education beneath

jungle canopies, even as we wiped their spittle 

off our old military shirts, most of us knew that

too much of what they yowled was true--and

hordes of us found out how battle fatigue became

PTSD, & we watched some of our buddies lose

their dignity, their jobs, their families, & their minds,

hiding from fireworks celebration, hiding from guilt

& shame & anger & murderous fits of rage;

But hey, boy howdy, most of us soldiered-up, returned to school,

wrestled our own demons, somehow rebuilt our lives--until 9/11,

with the onset of the New Crusades, the rise of radical Islamic

terrorists perpetrating medieval conflicts in the holy land, where

Jesus once wept, watching those wars eclipse & overtake the

sad decade of our involvement in Viet Nam--and now, those of

us who can, who are still here, reach out to the tens of thousands

of broken men & women, more wounded fodder, damaged goods,

spit out & abandoned by the fat cat politicians who control the VA,

& continue to put the cream of our youth in harm’s way. But we

are determined to hold them, hug them, console & consult them,

taking ownership of some of their pain, often amazed how doing

that has peeled the scabs off our own ancient wounds.

Duty calls, and young

men answer, but too often it

will cost their sweet lives.

                              

                                       

Glenn Buttkus

Posted Over at dVerse Poets Pub