If - A Poem of Remembrance for those brave souls still out there

If

By David Roth

©18 September, 2015

In Honor and Memory of those who went off to serve

But didn’t come Home

If somehow by the grace of God

you came home…

On 8 of March in ‘sixty-five

The Ninth Marine Brigade arrived

An ‘expeditionary’ Force

You came boots dry on China Beach

Just south, Da Nang within your reach

Did anyone survive? Is there one yet alive?

Thirty-five Thousand “Few and Proud”

Their M-14’s and jungle shroud,

Wade through the most surreal crowd

of tourists snapping pictures

while Vietnamese girls string leis

on the symbols of the eve of destruction?

If somehow by the grace of God

you came home…

to see the long black wall

most frightening of all

your name is chiseled there.

 It’s not there in the typical way

Of fingers smudged in charcoal gray

No, there’s no hint of closure,

Nothing you can take away

See, the book says you’re still missing

POW

M

I

A

If it matters, really matters

That you finally made it home

But there’s no one who remembers

But the writer of this tome

Or that thirty years ago they shouted

“Baby killer!” “Go away!”

If things might have been different

From that shower of orange Tox,

If they’d looked a little harder, little longer

If you could see your wife and son from

Outside this flag draped box.

If somehow by the grace of God

you came home…