Yes, Sir!

1

One-Oh-Worst rotates
infantry onto the hill while
ARVN First pushes out of
Khe Sanh into Laos.

The company C.O. they chopper in is all
Starch and Ego, and horrified that
the last unit left the latrine barrels brimming, and
that five years' garbage straggles down the
gorges below the gun pits.

He details his grunts to lug the
crap cans to the edge of the hilltop --
the east wall of our bunker
(but we weren't his people) --
for burning, so he treats Quad-50 and
us to eighteen hours of nausea till

Quad-50's guys manage to lever the
hot barrels over the first
rank of concertina and heave the
stinking slop part
way down hill.


2

I'm on the chopper pad grabbing
a view of the convoys dodging mortar
rounds on QL9 snaking into the Ba Long
valley when all of a sudden this
same Puke is jumping my case:

Where are your helmet and flak jacket troop?
Don't you know my standing orders?

Sorry sir. I'm not with your unit.

If you're on my hill, you follow my orders.
This base was hit hard last night.
Is that boonie hat or T shirt going to stop shrapnel?

No sir.
Enlisted can't tell a Puke like that anything --
even if the truth is, our unit has had men on this
hill for three years running, and
it hasn't taken a round for the last eighteen months, and
it was Fuller, ten kilometers west that
took the hits last night.

No, enlisted goes and puts on a helmet and flak jacket --
at least till the Puke is out of sight.


3

Since cleanliness is next to Godliness, and
all those shell wrappers and ammo crates and
ration boxes and tin cans and Lord-knows-what-all
sloughing down from the gun pits look
disgraceful, The Starch details his grunts to
pick all the trash they can out of the
mine fields without falling off the hill, or worse.

Then he gives orders to torch the rest.

Holed up in our bunkers for 36 hours, we wonder
what the Genius is telling his headquarters
while five years' discarded claymores,
rifle rounds, powder bags, flares,
grenades, mortar and artillery shells
spatter shrapnel from the burning trash
all across the hill.


(c) Copyright R. S. Carlson 1989