Five Haiku about “Goodbye, Farewell, and Amen”
1.
Everyone leaves;
nothing lasts, not even war—
the stones say good-bye
2.
Set in Korea,
it was about Vietnam.
And maybe … Iraq?
3.
Dressed for aloha,
a fellow Hawkeye’s lesson:
crack-up or bug-out.
4.
When was the last time
we all sat down together
and watched the same show?
5.
The two rules of war:
young men die, and doctors can’t
change rule No. 1.
Note on the poem: The 2-hour series finale of the TV show “MAS*H,” titled “Goodbye, Farewell, and Amen,” aired on CBS Feb. 23, 1983. More than 121 million people watched the broadcast.
Randy “Sherpa” Brown traveled the world as a child in an active-duty U.S. Air Force family in the 1970s, then landed permanently and happily in the American Midwest. A former editor of community and metro newspapers, as well as national trade and “how-to” consumer magazines, he is now a freelance writer and editor based in Central Iowa. Brown embedded with his former Iowa Army National Guard unit as a civilian journalist in Afghanistan, May-June 2011. A 20-year military veteran with one overseas deployment, he subsequently authored the award-winning 2015 collection Welcome to FOB Haiku: War Poems from Inside the Wire.
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