Each and Every Day

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What can I say?
How can I put into words,
proper words,
its urgency?
its mind-branding enormity?

Kurtz would have understood.

My best friend – a bond forged in incoming fire
and very literally tempered in the blood of those better than I.
He kept me alive, I kept him out of cells.
He thinks he owes me. I know he’s wrong.
He’s the best man I know.
Old now, growing older at an increasing rate.

But alive,
mostly.

Seven of them there were,
in a place nobody should ever,
ever have had to go,
for Hell is more than a religious notion.
Such was their innocence that
those grey-eyed professionals
didn’t think twice beforehand.
And they got the job done, so that’s something, I guess.

What was it, you ask?
Sorry, I can’t say.
No, I’m not trying to be mysterious
or shovel some silly mall-ninja poseur-tude.
I’m not trying to seem important, I swear.

It’s that I just... can’t.

Homicide cops occasionally have the same trouble, it’s said.
The scenes they are occasionally called on to wade into
are things no man
– or woman –
with any humanity can take home to those they love.
For our men at home are big and tough,
(our women may be smaller, but they’re tough in a different way),
but we love them
and we know that nobody should open the curtains on some things.

So you push it down,
pretend to yourself that you’re tough enough
to carry it all another mile.
There’s really no other option, is there?
Not one you wish to contemplate.

And it doesn’t even matter what the mission was.
That’s the saddest thing about it.

No, it wasn’t Vietnam or Iraq or some other famous place
a man might aspire be proud to sport on a t-shirt.
Actually,
nobody elected at the time would even acknowledge it as combat.

Hell, maybe it wasn’t. I won’t judge.

But there were seven of them 25 years ago.
Since then,
three suicides,
one’s fallen off the face of the earth,
one exists, singing mad quiet little songs in the loneliest rubber room.
A sixth lies mindless in a hospital ward following
a suspected drug overdose
(he didn’t leave notes)

and my friend.

A factoid for you, gentle citizen.
There are, at last count, 58,282 names
on the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial in Washington,
one for each serviceman or woman who lost their lives
as a result of that war.

Fact two: the last US troops left Vietnam in 1973 -
almost half a memory-clad, slow-march century ago.

One last datum for you -
a 2013 Veterans Administration study concluded that
22 veterans were committing suicide every day.

Five deaths in the stillness of your sleep
before you slap your bedside alarm for its impudence.
The last sip of your breakfast coffee
commemorates another name’s ink drying on the list.
When you finally get to work, add another -
and two more by coffee break,
another by lunch.
When you finally go to sleep in your own soft bed,
20 vets – your vets – will have died by their own hands
and...
two more are right now staring thin-lipped at a mirror,
Hellbound before the day itself is finally permitted to die.

And tomorrow’s another day.

Be conservative; call it 7,500 a year.

Do the math...

My friend.
Each and every day,
I pray that I may see him again.