The D-Day Issue is here!
The D-Day issue is in honor of the allied forces of World War II and features work regarding different experiences and perspectives on military service from several different periods in recent history. This issue features themed poetry by Tom Sheehan, Krikor Der Hohannessian, Sandra Soli, and Lucia May.
Featuring:
Christopher Garland
29 FRAGMENTS FROM AN UNTOLD MEMORY OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR
__________________________________________________________
1.
The days and nights can be so relentlessly hot in Rangoon, Burma—I’m calling it Rangoon, Burma because that’s what it was called back when this happened—that the cactus spikes jammed deep in the flesh of my grandfather’s back started to work their way up to his skin. The spikes had been there for over a decade, and they came out via nasty boils that needed to be lanced and cleaned. (All very painful, I’m sure, but that’s the effect of Southeast Asia’s humidity for you.) There were cactus spikes stuck in his back because he was in an artillery regiment in North Africa during the Second World War, and the explosion from an enemy shell smashed a cactus, shooting out a heap of non-fatal, natural shrapnel. Unfortunately, my grandfather was in its path.
Tom Sheehan
ACES & EIGHTS
________________________________________
Compulsive excitement filled Sergeant Charlie Twohig, down to his toes. Ledo, at this end of the Burma Road, was not a scavenger’s post with a limited amount of personnel; it was an army metropolis burgeoning even in the darkness with a kind of stateside activity. The muffled sound of a laboring engine crawled out of a nearby valley, sounding as if it were under wraps, promising more engines up the line with the sometimes slow hum of war. From the edge of night he heard the tom-tom of a hammer beating on sheet metal. Night guards, bent on their watches and patrols, loomed as hulking giants working thick shadows. The heat, floating down out of another valley, at first did not seem to bother Charlie Twohig. Noise and activity meant people and people meant money and money meant gambling. The long haul from North Africa had been worth the trouble; the pigeons, his resolute mind said, were ready for the taking.
Terri Maue
FAREWELL, COMRADE
________________________________________
The man in the coffin, the body in the coffin, was not he. For one thing, he needed a cigar. Those thin, colorless lips clamped tightly together would have told me he was dead, even if all the other clues had been absent.
His lips were what I remembered about my husband’s Uncle Harold. In life, they were thick and red and always cradling a wet stub of unlit cigar. I had nearly always gagged to look at it, a fat brown stump, slobbered all over at one end. But the way he held it absently in the drawn-up corner of his mouth might have also contributed to the other thing I remembered about him, the hint of a smile that made him always look slightly bemused.
Ken Harshbarger
ON THE RUN
___________________________________________________
Linda and I. I would have described our relationship as volatile and a large part of me wanted it to work out, so I’m sure that our friends, who often had to listen to one of us complain about the other, called us a train wreck; we were always on the fritz for one reason or another. I suppose I’d never really accepted the fact that I had entered into a lifelong relationship with her, though I had. In a way we had given up on each other. We were married, which is about as lifelong as it gets, but in the back of my mind I always had an exit strategy, so that when things went bad I would throw up my hands and walk away. Linda did the same; she had no tolerance for me. We were always spinning our wheels in the same muck; nothing ever got solved, no ground ever gained. I felt stuck and she felt underappreciated and we rode in silence down the highway in search of lunch. Linda drove, haughty as ever with her nose in the air.
Craig Reinbold
RAMBO FLASHES DEUCES
______________________________________________
We rendezvoused the day before Thanksgiving at The Common Cup, an independent coffee shop close to where he was living, up in the Rogers Park neighborhood of Chicago. Not having a car, I’d biked there from my city-central neighborhood, arriving twenty minutes early, a sweaty mess. I stripped down in the bathroom, toweled off, and put on jeans, a fresh t-shirt, and a dark purple button-down, which I tucked in. It was wrinkled, ridiculously, from having been stuffed into a backpack. I slipped out of my Adidas kicks and into an old pair of brown loafers, which I’d calculated would give me an air of respectability.
Larry Townsend
SPY SCHOOL GRADUATES
________________________________________
I joined a peace-time army. Well, O.K., Vietnam was still active, but not for very long. So although I am a Vietnam-era vet, I never saw Vietnam except in pictures.
My wife and I had decided to see the world and because of poverty, we wanted to cash in somebody else’s dime. I talked to the Air Force recruiter who offered me a “dream sheet.” That’s a piece of paper that you list the 3 places you would like to go. I asked him how many people in the 10 years he had been recruiting received their first choice.
“None,” he replied.
Second choice?
“Uh, none.”
Third choice?
“One!” He smiled brightly.
Richard Hartwell
FLASHBACKS
_______________________________________
What Was It Like?
“What was it like in the war honey, what did you do?”
“What was it like in the war dad, did you carry a gun?”
“What was it like in the war grandpa, did you kill anyone?”
Perennial questions with ethereal answers, each one different for the requester. The warp and woof of time and memory cloak my recollections with untrue answers that are more real than the experience. I am clothed in my impressions and they are more vivid than any archival news footage or journalistic bombast. It’s strange how much easier it is to pack light mentally and travel backwards now.
Pingback: FOLDED FLOWER – By Doug Bond | Burnt Bridge
Pingback: D-Day Issue Preview – Larry Townsend | Burnt Bridge