[Long Trang]

Great Poems man.  Wouldnt happen to have any more do you?

[Greg]

I went to a very small, ultra liberal high school where it is remarkable any time someone joins the military. I can only think of about three people from my time there that ever did. There was a man who graduated before I ever got there named Kylan Jones-Huffman. He went to the Naval Academy and was a successful Lt. He wrote a lot of poetry. Here is some that he wrote after being deployed to Iraq:

squirrel drinking
from one small puddle -
tank tracks

gaunt children
selling old bayonets -
noonday sun

summer solstice -
women in black abayas
wade in the sea

twelve hour watch:
the morning threat report
in rhymed couplets

He was deployed with Marines in Iraq as an intelligence officer. On August 21st of last year, he was in the passenger seat of a truck in Al Hillah near Baghdad when an unidentified man walked up to the vehicle with an AK and shot him through the window.

The final poem he wrote just three days before this read:

uncomfortable —
body armor shifting
on the car seat


http://www.usna.com/Features/2002_2003/OpIraqFreedom/Huffman/Huffman.htm

[Giland]

I thought I would post these, thought some here would like them.


SNIPER'S REGRET

( By Patrick Johannesen, U.S.M.C. )

I wonder in the night time
I wonder who will hear
I wonder if they know . . . . .
How close, I am near.

Do they have a family?
Do I give a ****?
They will only live . . . . . .
If they ****ing duck!!

The first one did not duck,
The other looks my way.
I crank another round home
And send him on his way.

It’s baggage and I know it.
Man, it really sucks.
If only I’d not been there and . . . . . .
If only they had ducked.

Semper Fi
Patrick Johannesen, U.S.M.C.
Copyright © 1995 by Patrick Johannesen



------------------------------------------------

Sniper's Serenity

( A reply to Sniper's Regret, by Robert W. Baird, U.S.M.C. )

A green phantom stalks these lands,
Thirty Ought Six in a Master's hands.
Chamber a matched, perfect round,
Slide home the bolt, forward and down.

Stay detached, loose and cool,
Time your breathing, remember the rule.
Get them now, kill them clean,
before they can hurt another Marine.

The first dies quick, the second has looked,
that one dies fast, a third has booked.
Number Three goes down, sight on Number Four,
this one's for my Brothers, Brothers of the Corps.

Even now at home, I remember that scene,
the four of them and a young Marine,
I would do it again, once more with pride,
to protect my Marines, the enemy has died.

~ Jungle Vet '95 ~


http://www.vietvet.org/jungvet5.htm