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Poet's |
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(Seattle Airport, May 1972) All those young men, restless currents of them-- like me, going to a new place, unlike me, not their choice. Clean fatigues and shiny boots; white, brown faces-- Oriental here or there. They filled the waiting area, swarmed the aisles, snack counters, rest rooms. Ever-changing eddies of faces: voices loud, excited, devil-may-care; quiet, remote, stoic.
Over beer in airport bar to temper the waiting, Tom spoke of Alaska's wonders, but hours away, though now and then he paused as a new crowd of soldiers came in or another group left to board their flight. Both of us watching, saying the same thing: Thank God, we were too old for the draft! Yet they pulled us off our ease, an insistent undertow.
"Can you imagine," I whispered, "slogging through a rice paddy or a jungle in a few days, waiting for someone to shoot at you? Sweating, miserable, knowing there's no sense to it?" "I can imagine scared out of my freaking skull," he muttered. "How many will return hurt?" "Or not at all." The past clearly told the future.
We tried to talk of Alaska, but all those young men so eclipsed everything that we were relieved when our plane was called. Soon, we were on a blue and silver Pan Am 707 roaring north, while similar aircraft, loaded chock-a-block with young men in olive drab, were taking off one by one, turning westward, chasing the setting sun.
"Maybe being older is not so bad. Better unemployed in Alaska than employed in Vietnam." "You're damn right there, but you'll find a job." "Why them and not us?" "Jesus, who knows? Roll of the dice." Three hours later the Alaska sun, strangely orange, rose to meet us over the bleak horizon, and we were coming down, over dark-green, ragged spruce, over the muddy, many-braided Chena River. Landing in Fairbanks!
And I momentarily forgot those other planes with expendable cargoes of all those restless young men: Johnson-Nixon's great lottery picks with such murderous payoffs. * * * * Final results long ago carved in stone. Though thirty-odd years later their faces still haunt. All those young men, destinies dice- tossed. All those restless young men: Who won? Who lost?
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