Alice's Poem for Louise

Louise's sister Alice wrote several poems over the years trying to make sense of her sister's experience in Vietnam.  She sent me this one with permission to print it.  It was written some 30 years after the fact, from the viewpoint of her sister or any other nurse like her. Her comments on the poem are below.

Reality Show

 

I came back to The World in 1971---

A year had gone by.

From Saigon to San Francisco on a transport

then on to Chicago Midway by commercial.

MURDERER!

BABY KILLER!

25 hours of flight-and-wait time

only to arrive to the taunts of unkempt homies.

They wore filthy fatigues and long strands of Love beads,

bodies bouncing around

unencumbered by clean or dirty underwear.

Some sat on the ground, wrapped in dirty Old Glories.

They carried placards with the peace symbol

demanding PEACE NOW!

Their version and mine of reality.....

MURDERER!

BABY KILLER!

One guy protested by spitting on me.

I stopped in an airport gift shop, bought a sweatshirt.

Ducked into a ladies' to peel off the dress greens,

switching to wheat-jeans and sandals from my carry-on

to go with the new shirt. Stuffed the pantyhose

in the trash.

My feet were cold, but blending in,

I sat at the Ozark gate,

waiting for the final leg of the journey,

my flight to Waterloo.

MURDERER!
BABY KILLER!

I had been off saving babies for a year.

From newborns of mixed-racial parentage

left by their abandoned mothers with the nuns

at the orphanage down the road from the unit,

to American boy-babes

a couple-three years younger than I,

drafted from cities and towns and farms

back in The World---

They were carried into our Med-Evac

asking for Mom

and I shush-shushed them, saying, "It's OK......"

and the ones we didn't save

couldn't save

are forever twenty in my mind.

                        ---AMW 8/28/03

 

This was a previous effort that I had polished up & used for a poetry course, and the instructor, who was a student at the Writer's Workshop at the University of Iowa, was probably a lot younger & didn't understand it. He didn't know a military transport plane from a commercial flight. BIG difference in comfort of the ride & how much room there was for feet and legs. This guy opined that hippie demonstrators were a myth, that this did not REALLY happen......that they would spit on returning military people in uniform. 

 

But it did happen, and it happened to Louise in Chicago.  Ozark was a midwest airline company, now long defunct.  And that orphanage was real, too. Louise wrote home about the conditions there, and she got our mother to do a baby clothing drive. Mom got ALL the church women in town going on that, Reformed, Methodist, and Roman Catholic, and gathered several boxes of baby things to ship to VietNam. 

 

It was an interesting time!  I suppose all times are interesting........if you think about it. :-)  Lots to pray about.