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Father at war
By Jack Buckingham
He spoke with warm misty eyes and choking voice Of his training days with new knockabout mates And the places he'd seen as such a young man, Like the steaming islands of swaying tropical heat Where the back laneways off local bars Were walked with nerve in inky blackness Past single spots of menacing cigarettes And the ringing stories of last month's cut-throat knifings, Like the jungle, where you never saw the sun, And the time he was separated from his platoon After a skirmish, with three other soldiers, young like him, And they crawled back through crocodile-infested swamp, Burning the leeches off each other's necks With cigarettes, smouldering only, for the enemy was everywhere, They set him up as lance-corporal for that, But, a willing hostage to a filial code in arms, He deliberately lost it on a bender with the boys The night of the major general's visit.
And later on he was glued to the glorious early 60s shows, Anzac, Combat, even The Gallant Men, And he testily defended all the horror of Hiroshima As if his world was still not safe, But he sat white-knuckled, in extra tight-lipped silence, And stonily read every syllable written In the smoking aftermath of My Lai As my twentieth birthday loomed, and with it The lottery national ballot for marbles of conscription, And in all his often repeated stories He only once mentioned the morning patrol When his new best friend, the next man ahead, Sprawled suddenly, spread-eagled, shot dead,
And in a searing flash of answering fire My father killed directly his first and only man, Sent him crashing from an ambush tree, And a rough rummage of his blood-splattered pocket Revealed the bullet-pierced photo of a young family man Of Japan, and a pretty wife and smiling baby daughter Whose lives he had certainly changed forever, And all in the days before counsellors in grief. A brittle, fidgeting man thereafter Who held a grudging soft spot for the Salvos Just for staying up there at the front,
And he watched the televised Anzac Day parades But religiously kept away himself, He would spring awake in drenching sweats At the click of dawn for a decade after, And spent a fitful remainder of his lifetime Driving to work on empty roads before birdsong, Relaxing only at the banks of country trout streams Before the light lifted to face the day.
Not a man to retire. it was barely a year That they turned him almost roughly And set the air rasping in release As a prolonged bubble of sound spelt his last seconds, While three steps in from the hospital doorway, I silently stood, diminished by his loss, And watched his face fall somehow into peace.
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