Wounds or Scars: To Other Veterans Like Me
Jim Moreno
What I’ve survived are now scars, sensitive
to the touch but no longer stinging or biting.
When I remember that front bunker
watch in Saigon, June of ’69, that red-headed
First Class P.O. knew he handed me a rifle
I didn’t know how to fire.
I didn’t know when I took that piece, I went from
being a boy to a man. I wonder about other veterans
like me, 21 years old, first moments in a war zone,
boots on the ground, legs shaking.
I wonder if other vets felt like I did when he taught
me to curse at human beings in Vietnamese if they
loitered in front of the billet, and after two reviling
shouts, if they still remained but didn’t leave, to shoot them.
I wonder how many veterans felt a storm in their stomachs
when they were told to carry out an order that repulsed them.
Like a storm of bile that grew to a tsunami mushroom cloud,
a burning that they never felt before.
Did any other veteran say to themselves,
“This is not what I signed up for! This is not me.”
That day in Vietnam, the old skin-and-bones grandpa
driving his rickety, rusty bicycle stopped right in front of me.
Twelve baskets piled one on top of the other,
tied to the back of his bike.
I obeyed the cursing command but he didn’t leave.
I pointed the rifle at him and forced a piercing scream.
He retreated, wide-eyed, pedaling furiously away
to live, to live!
And in that moment, I realized I had saved a grandpa
while refusing that command, refusing to kill.
Sometimes being a man of peace is simply keeping your
finger off the trigger.
Two weeks later, I was on board my LST when I found out the sailor
who had my front bunker watch had himself, the bunker, the concertina
wire behind the bunker, and half the Annapolis hotel
blown away by a bomb and thrown from the back of a motor bike.
I missed my death by two weeks.
That’s why it’s not easy to write letters home when
you’re in the rivers of Vietnam.
*Written in the “How We Say It” veterans writing project, Summer 2023
Jim Moreno is a Vietnam Veteran and was the Central Florida coordinator for Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) from 1970 to 1973. A member of the Smuwich Chumash, Jim’s older brother, John Moreno, is his mentor and spiritual adviser. He’s the author/co-editor of 4 books of poetry & 2 CDs of poetry & music. Moreno is the coordinator of the San Diego/Tijuana ReEvolutionary Poets Brigade, a regional editor of the San Diego Poetry Annual, and a member of the Advisory Board of the Institute for Poetic Medicine. Find him at http://www.jimpoet.com.
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