Like so many combatants back from war my peers who fought in Viet Nam would not speak of it. Then Ken Burns released his ten episode series on PBS about those hostilities, and the spectacle/specter returned in living color. That whole period continues to haunt me.
Flashback
Buried in the paper:
Agent Orange causes cancer
even in vets who worked
the desks in Saigon,
never fought on the frontline.
My friend pushed papers
there, shot skeet for action,
came home alive.
I thought to call him
with this news then realized
he died twenty years ago,
a fast growing renal tumor
taking him down.
Marilyn Aschoff Mellor
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