Outside Kuwait City (1991)
We came upon them mid-day,
in a rush for shelter from the petrol rain:
three corpses upright
in an armored personnel carrier,
as crisp as dime-store cigars,
their boots melted into the floorboard.
Oil fires illuminated a blast zone
surrounding the vehicle,
casting a perverse half-light
over the living and dead.
Some Marines took pictures with the corpses,
souvenirs for the living back home.
We cracked jokes to steady our nerves.
I kept watch through the scorched steel turret,
frightened less by the dead
than the unseen.
Grandfather came to mind,
lying embalmed in a casket in Enid, Oklahoma.
I was sixteen when he died.
The mortician overdid Grandpa's makeup,
which cracked like desert topsoil
at the hairline.
I half-expected him to rise up
and scold the adults
for displaying him that way.
Someone passed around the photographs.
The laughter stopped.
Thunder from approaching artillery
rattled our reprieve.
We shouldered our packs
and stepped into the poison rain.
A boot private from Encinitas, California,
glanced back as a helmet
tumbled from the carrier.
"Sucks to be them," he said.
**First published in As You Were literary magazine
and second-place winner of the 2023 Col. Darren L. Wright Memorial Writing Awards.
**Illustration by Morgane Xenos
