Vietnam Again

We sat for hours in my car,
a baby blue Mercury Comet
in the alley behind Owen’s house
in Cheyenne, 1968. He was
gonna enlist the next day. We

served Mass together, drank
crazy like high school kids
together, played baseball
on different teams, always
buddies no matter the score,

double dated, whispered the
secrets of grasping, awkward,
adolescent love to one another.
He’d been voted Most Handsome,
Most Likely to Succeed.

You’ll be trained to kill, I argued.
I know you. You can’t do that.
You’ll become another disposable
particle of LBJ’s ego. Vietnam’s
an illegal, immoral war. You
can’t go, I almost pleaded—
no, I pleaded.

It’s the right thing to do, he said,
besides, I’ve had it with school.
The Army will make me a man.
We went back and forth until
our night of Coors quarts turned
into a dry-tongued dawn. The

fingerposts of our futures diverged
wildly: I returned to college and
applied to for conscientious objection.
Owen signed the papers held
in the recruiter’s hands.

Six months later I leaned into
the gelid Laramie wind, opened
the envelope from my draft board
that could portend five years in prison
or a life of exile over our northern border, but
my plea against killing had been accepted!

I fell into a fever worthy of a Russian novel:
roiling in my sheets, floridly hallucinating,
stranger to dream and reality alike, when
Owen appeared at my door. He’d gone to
bootcamp where they’d taught him to scream
“Die Gook,” while he practiced gutting
a human being with a bayonet.

He couldn’t take it. When they wouldn’t
allow him to file for conscientious objection
he simply left, went AWOL. He’d landed
on my doorstep on his way to Canada—
a fugitive I was happy to harbor.

He’s alone now, high all the time,
never married, no children,
angry and disillusioned,
an out-of-work social worker
in Casper, but in my mindscape
we’re back in that car,

a comet in the sky,
behind his house, on
a frosty night in Cheyenne,
midwinter,
mid-war,
mid-America,
mid-hope.

Charlie Brice is a retired psychoanalyst and is the author of Flashcuts Out of Chaos (2016), Mnemosyne’s Hand (2018), and An Accident of Blood (2019), all from WordTech Editions. His poetry has been nominated for the Best of Net anthology and twice for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in The Atlanta Review, The Main Street Rag, Chiron Review, I-70 Review, The Paterson Literary Review, and elsewhere.