Probably Not the Final Destination.

Ritterbusch, Dale E.

 Probably Not the Final Destination
    Last words before deployment
   Keep your head down--
   a trite phrase I recoiled from
   even as I said it,
   but I had nothing else to offer
   there being nothing intelligent to say,
   nothing of any value, any use.
   When he came back two years later,
   he was subdued, no trace of bravado,
   no gung ho, can do, Huah!
   posturing in his demeanor--
   16,000 miles in a Humvee, the early ones
   without armor, back and forth across
   the hardscape of Iraq, a back injury
   the only physical sign. But I imagine
   a drive to work where a plastic bag
   blown across the road, hanging on a fence,
   flickers in the wind, catches his attention--
   his car slows, his adrenaline spikes--
   might as well be searching for IED's
   along Route Irish.
   He tells me the VA screwed up his benefits,
   asks for some advice, and all I can say
   is nothing much has changed
   though I caustically think
   change is supposedly the basis of everything,
   just another lie we tell pretending things get better.
   I tell him the story of a marine who lost half
   his jaw when hit by an RPG in Vietnam,
   and the VA said there was no record of his injury,
   no proof his wound was war-related.
   We walk to the parking lot, a few words
   that mean little passing between us,
   both of us lost in the silence of the waning light,
   the hard, angled reflections off windshield and mirror.
   He looks at the car in the slot next to his
   and says, under his breath, Only an idiot
   would drive a KIA.
   Every way back dried blood on the highway
   the dead deer pushed to the shoulder--
   filled with explosives--chills an injured spine
   as certainly as if he'd never returned,
   as if return were something possible:
   Like the time in a bar, shortly after he got out,
   when the man sitting next to him
   finished his beer and said, Well, that soldier's dead,
   setting the bottle down hard on the bar.
   The expression hit him like a cold chisel
   hammered into bone.
   Fall semester, second week of class, a student stays after:
   his field jacket, his scruffy beard
   tell the story. I don't know if you have noticed,
   he says, but when I answer your questions
   sometimes I lose my line of thought
   and I stumble a bit trying to find it again.
   I tell him the lie I hadn't noticed, but his speech,
   slurred, slowed, gives it away--a sergeant,
   twenty-seven months in Iraq. My wife thinks
   I have PTSD he says. Every class he stays after,
   and there's little I can say, little I can do
   except listen: maybe there's little anyone can do,
   that old lesson we never seem to learn,
   moving from "costly their winestream"
   to the "red, sweet wine of youth":
   enough there to embarrass half the demons of hell.
   At night the NewsHour runs pictures
   of the dead, name, rank, hometown flashing,
   holding, silently across the screen--the first man just eighteen.
   We might remember Urien's lament: "I bear a great
   warrior's skull; I bear a head at my heart."
   Or has war's paradigm so changed
   Urien's progeny may now swear,
   "I bear the dead, the half-dead
   in my half-dead skull; I bear
   the dead in my half-dead heart."
   I pour another glass of wine, a fine Medoc,
   let my brain swirl like smoke in a small wind.
   When the smoke clears, I recall an image
   from one of the stories told by this Iraq War vet:
   Stopped at a checkpoint, sitting in his Humvee,
   a car bomb explodes two vehicles back;
   he watches the toasted, smoldering torso of the driver
   fly over his head.
   In October the sergeant discovers his wife's
   been seeing another man; she's 23,
   he's 38. One weekend, VA counseling
   going nowhere, he punches the bedroom wall--
   twice. I say, I trust you missed hitting the studs.
   Once, he replies, explaining how now he has to patch
   both walls, inside, outside, where his fist bulged out
   the sheathing and popped the siding loose.
   Today is cold, rainy, on my way to work,
   leaves plastered to the street,
   the hoods of cars. A Beamer zips around me
   in heavy traffic, brakes hard, forces me to brake.
   I notice a magnetic yellow ribbon, faded, half of it
   broken away, half-assed support for the troops
   on the back ass end of his car.
   I wonder if the bastard ever thought to enlist,
   my anger rising. In some parallel
   universe, perhaps, I'd accept any of this
   and respond charitably, a calm serenity
   coursing through my days: I'd recite
   the psalms while nations rage. The traffic
   slows, grinds, squeals to a halt, none of us
   going anywhere we need to be.
   Weeks later the sergeant lies on his couch
   taking a mid-morning nap; he wakes
   to the concussion wave of exploding ordnance,
   a mortar round close and as real as anything
   he's ever known. Thinking his ears are blown
   he reaches up, softly, gently, pats the side of his face,
   feeling for a warm trickle of blood. 

A contributing editor to WLA, DALE RITTERBUSCH is the author of two collections of poetry, Lessons Learned and Far From the Temple of Heaven.