Your Service
Tatters
of dinette chairs flap in the Gulf breeze.
Like
an island’s backside,
suburban
bungalow, pink with sun,
private
side of conches and radishes.
Owner
and occupant, survivor,
outlives
wife, sister, lives
to
tell the story again and again
of
barbaric Japs on a Pacific
island,
two week mission
drawn
out over months,
long
beyond strategy,
mired
in rote maneuver, headless
torsos,
rotting wounded,
military
brass losing interest.
The
old man, then nineteen,
lost
there whatever youth he had
coming
to him.
He
borrowed a watch from
one
of the corpses
as a
souvenir, inherits it back
when
his mother dies, naturally,
of
Camels and a broken heart.
Almost
too late, an interviewer
asks
all about it. The old man,
fingers
on the kitchen faucet,
tells
about the battle, details
he
laughed around for decades.
At
work, he managed a theater,
another
water spectacular
where
the stage revolved,
spun
on the ocean like a
top
of dreams.
Guy
Lombardo, loyal Canadian,
led
the band afterwards
under
the tent, under the stars,
and
the Schaefer flowed.
The
old man writes a book
about
going back to Brooklyn,
visiting
his dead buddy’s family,
describing
to them the quiet death
he
didn’t have,
sparing
them details
no
civilian could bear.
The
book stirs a little interest,
Hollywood
consults, documentary
cameos,
but it doesn’t last.
There
are too many stories in this world
for
our innocent audience to
linger
long over one. The old man
sinks
into the archives, where his war
is
one of thousands.
He
still keeps a neat house,
pool
cemented over, dolphins
parading
the canal two shows a day.
The
sun pounds the sofa.
Pink
carpet fades where
windows
have their way.
We
watch a DVD where he
and
others tell their stories,
for
once backed up by
newly
found footage,
military
cameras sent to
record
victory, instead see
butchered
bodies, men dancing
hysterics,
lost in deranged performance.
The
old man remarks,
“What
do the kids say now?
‘Thanks
for your service’?”
I
nod, no better response
than
that well-meaning,
knee
jerk platitude suggested
by a
lollipop media that still can’t
grasp
the depth of the experience.
If
service is productive, meaningful,
something
built where there was less,
then
his time in Pacific was a service.
Did
he intend to serve his country?
Only
propaganda films,
patriotic
melodramas aim that high.
Leaving
the stickball, the pretty girls
behind
in the wild youth of Brooklyn,
he
enlisted, hoping for a better time
than
those that waited to be drafted.
What
he got was gore no film could capture.
What
he got was a watch whose time
had
stopped in Peleliu,
gears
ground to a solid halt
decades
before.
CAR
3/7/16
