johnny was a hot head

in country for nine days

the pride of basic training

and america’s ‘finest’

“make us proud son” just

itchin’ for some action

“gonna get me some gooks”

his unit walked into an ambush

“victor charley, victor charley!”

johnny took rounds unknown

once while crouching

another as he dove for cover

more as he lay on the jungle floor

screaming his guts out

while the battle roared around him

“finish the job, finish the job!”

he thought he would die there

but modern warfare cleans up well

and he was laying on the table of a hospital ship

before he knew it

a nurse explained to him later that

he was going home because they couldn’t

extract all the bits of shrapnel

johnny left the army with a morphine habit

and a handful of twisted metal

his broken body healing slowly

his broken mind never quite making it back

every couple of years

he’d be back at the va hospital in westwood

getting another piece of shrapnel

extracted

his ‘metals of valor’ he called ‘em

kept the pieces in a jar in the garage

told me how sometimes at night

he’d wake in a sweat

frozen on the bed

the roar of battle again in his ears

until he realized it was only traffic

that the body laying motionless next to him

was only his girlfriend

but the terror lingered

like the faint smell of rot

the last time i saw johnny

he told me how the shrapnel in that jar

had begun to talk to him

how he’d begun to spend long hours

in the garage staring at his “trophies”

he told me he’d bought a gun

(much to his girlfriend’s dismay)

a small pistol with enough power to

‘get the job done’ and he gave me a look

so’s i would know what he meant

and i did

‘cause i knew that at night

even when the nightsweats weren’t working their magic on him

johnny would hear that tiny chorus

buzzing in his left ear

and it would only be a matter of time

before he’d have to obey

that order he’d heard himself screaming

that afternoon in nam

“finish the job! finish the job!”

RD Armstrong