"Like Swans on Still Water"

[Arrow]

"Like Swans on Still Water" ~Dusty

Like swans on still water they skim over the war
Ao dais gliding, rustling serenely
gleaming black hair pulled primly away
from faces that reveal nothing save inner repose,
a beauty so deep even war can't defile.

I note my reflection in their obsidian eyes--
an outsized barbarian, ungainly, unkempt,
baggy in ever-wilted greens,
five-pound boots taking plowhand strides,
face perpetually ruddy, dripping in alien heat.

In their delicate presence I exhume teenage failures--
the girl in the back row forever unnoticed,
the one no one ever invited to dance,
the one never voted most-likely anything,
the one who was never quite something enough.

But once in a while, on a crazy-shift morning,
when I've worked through the night and I'm too tired to care, a young man who reeks of rice paddies lies waiting
for someone to heal the new hole in his life.
He says through his pain, all adolescent bravado,
"Hey, what's your name? Let's get married. I love you."

And just for a moment I become Nefertiti
and for all the Orient's pearls and silks
I would not trade the glamour and privilege
of these honored hands, licensed to touch
one filthy GI.

?1991 by Dusty

[Arrow]

"Mellow on Morphine" ~Dusty

Mellow on morphine, he smiles and floats
above the stretcher over which I hover.
I snip an annular ligament
and his foot plops unnoticed into the pail,
superfluous as a placenta after labor has ended.
His day was just starting when his hootch disappeared,
along with the foot and at least one friend.
Absently I brush his face,
inspecting, investigating,
validating data gathered by sight and intuition,
willing physical contact to fetter soul to earth.

"You the first white woman ever touch me."

Too late my heart dodges and weaves, evades the inevitable.
Ambushed again.
Damn, I'm in love.
Bonded forever by professional intimacies,
unwitting disclosures offered and accepted,
fulfilling a covenant sealed in our chromosomes,
an encounter ephemeral as fireflies on a hot Georgia night
in a place and time too terrible to be real.
But it will shoot flaming tracers through all my dreams
until the time my soul, too, floats unfettered.

When daylight waxes and morphine wanes,
when pain crowds his brain
and phantasms of his footless future bleach the bones of present
our moment together will fade as a fever dream
misty, gossamer, melting from make-believe
through might-have-been
past probably-didn't
all the way into never happen, man--
as I move on to the next stretcher
and the next fleeting lover--

?1991 by Dusty

[Arrow]

12th Evac ~Dusty

The hands remember what the mind evades:
death's quiet chill creeping from toes toward heart
the crepitation of pneumothorax
skin become pebbly where blasted with shrapnel
the tentative fluttering of terminal shock

The nightmares remember what the hands forget:
blowflies feasting on clotted bandages
the pounding of Hueys counting cadence for pulses
boots sliding and sticking in gore on the floor
the stormy tint of blasted bone
ranks of IV bottles clinking in chorus--
temple bells of mindfulness standing as sentinels
vigilant against the next crimson monsoon

The soul remembers what the heart disavows:
being mortally wounded by each soldier who died.

?1995 by Dusty

[Arrow]

"Flashback/ICU" ~Dusty

They must have told her just as
my feet rounded the corner.
The wail broke my stride and my concentration
as I scooted through the ICU
toward my trivial destination
(I think it was Dietary)
as her world shattered,
as the soul of her most beloved
slithered through the oscillations of her scream.

Back in 1968
they died in dustoffs
or on stretchers in R&E

they died on operating tables
or in post-op ICU
they died amid our hurried silence
they died
and died
and we never
never screamed.

?1996 by Dusty

[Arrow]

"Back in the World" ~Dusty

Only one shift and a wake-up
after the short-timer's party
at which I bequeathed
my electric skillet and
ratproof canisters
filled with pizza mix.

I'm so short I'm shadowless.

One last time I check the hooch
(second from the end)
I'm abandoning in favor of
yet another FNG
I will leave her no clue
as to my fate
or hers
before I hop the chopper
for the airbase and home.

The Nam becomes a pleasant patchwork
of roads and rice paddies,
streams and villages,
one final base camp
a ribbon of beach

"Gentlemen, Continental Airlines
is happy to announce that
we have just left the airspace
of the Republic of Vietnam."

Somewhere over the Pacific
we regain the day we lost
a lifetime ago.

?1992 by Dusty

[Arrow]

"DEROS (1968)" ~Dusty

Wobbling down the jetway in unaccustomed pumps
the confines of a Class A skirt impeding my progress
stateside stockings rubbing raw my nerves
a freakish fraud in back-in-the-World drag
I wish only for familiar fatigues.

Coping with crowds of vast, turbulent hurry
I take no notice of the college kids
(ordinary sight on this part of the planet)
so clean-cut they could be from Kansas--

until the beer cans hit their mark
one splashing my skirt, another dinging my shin.
Stunned, I ponder the existential question:
were those beer cans half empty
or half full?


?1994 by Dusty

[Arrow]

Dusty on PTSD

For me the most difficult part of being a woman Vietnam veteran with PTSD has been the unremitting sense of isolation. After returning from Vietnam and leaving the Army, I simply didn't encounter any other women who had been in Vietnam. I thought my feelings were unique. Trying to be just like everyone else seemed to be the culturally accepted and expected thing to do; it was the only way to re-enter society and try to have a life after Vietnam. It was the only way to escape the vilification that was being endured by my brother veterans.

Over the years I was afraid to contact other nurses I had known in Vietnam. In the first place, the sense of camaraderie we had felt hadn't been about dissecting our emotions with each other; it had been about working as a team, being able to count on each other absolutely. What if they rebuffed me and didn't want to talk? What if they were worse off than I? What if I was the only one who hadn't merely resumed her prewar life? Those conflicting but equally depressing possibilities made reaching out too risky. Male veterans either didn't recognize me as a real veteran or assumed they already knew what my war had been like. They were willing to joke about the nuoc mam, the jungle rot, and the Saigon tea, but they weren't willing to exhume the pain. I felt only partially connected to them: we shared the same esoteric vocabulary and arcane geography, but it seemed we didn't share the same emotional terrain. They knew how it felt to kill the enemy with a gun, but they didn't know how it felt to kill one of our own with a syringe or simply by running out of time. They knew how it felt to see a buddy maimed by a booby trap; they didn't know how it felt to look into the eyes above the mangled legs and tell that buddy he would never walk again. They had nightmares about being overrun; they didn't have nightmares of crying out, 'I'm wounded, too!' to male medics who never heard.

Likewise, society's silence about the war strangled me emotionally. I found that members of the Vietnam generation were expected to be either baby killers or war protesters. I had been neither. There was no niche in anybody's mental cupboard for whatever I was. Even when PTSD became the diagnosis of the month and Vietnam became a fit topic of conversation in polite circles, I was still invisible. Veterans were invariably referred to as 'he' or 'the men' or 'troops'--at one of the newly-opened Vet Centers, I was politely informed that women don't develop PTSD. If I wasn't a real veteran, then I couldn't possibly suffer any real consequences of the war.

The irony of my situation is that through my attempts to deal with PTSD I have, in fact, met some quality people who are willing to reach out to me in my pain; yet the PTSD compels me to keep them at a distance. Ever since Vietnam I've been wary of letting anyone get too close. I feel like a runner caught between bases--I want only to be safe, but I am expending all my energy getting nowhere, just trying to escape being tagged out. I can't ever get back where I started, much less make any forward progress. My dilemma is, I believe, common in Vietnam vets. I believe my ultimate healing from the trauma of the war will be found in reconnecting to the human family, but my trauma itself lies partly in the rejection I experienced, and causes me to flee all connection. I complain bitterly about the isolation, yet sometimes the only comfort I am able to tolerate is the silent companionship of my cats.

I often feel that there is no one out there like me, no one with whom I can experience that wordless, intuitive kind of sharing that to me connotes true intimacy and understanding. The war and its aftermath have left me stranded between the past and the present. The war diminished my possibilities for growth as a person. I sense that I have a lesser future than I would have had had I not gone. I don't even fully remember what kind of person I was before Vietnam. What kind of person am I now? Can I ever be a whole person again? The war took something important from me, but I can't even define it, much less begin to get it back.

?1994 by Dusty



http://www.trauma-pages.com/index.htm

http://www.sidran.org/trauma.html

http://home.satx.rr.com/sjsandjgs/sjs-links.html

http://www.trauma-pages.com/perry96.htm

[Arrow]

http://www.illyria.com/dustyhp.html

Dusty...

[nang]

Thank you Sparrow for posting those. I'm speechless.

[David]

Very moving poetry, thank you for posting these Arrow.