I was a twenty-four year-old Marine First Lieutenant helicopter pilot in Vietnam from November 1969 until September 1970 flying CH-46 Sea Knight helicopters from Phu Bai and later from Marble Mountain near Danang, both in northern I-Corps. I survived being shot down twice and also a serious crash resulting from a catastrophic flight control failure.  When we first moved to the Harrisburg area in 1975, the sound of Army National Guard UH-1 “Huey” helicopters from Ft. Indiantown Gap flying in the area on warm, muggy summer evenings would take me back in time to those places and events, an experience I’m sure was shared by many Vietnam vets, given the ubiquity of “Huey” helicopters in that war. I later became a member of the Pennsylvania Army National Guard flying those same helicopters on warm summer evenings (and on cold, winter evenings as well), something I continued doing for twenty-three years. After retiring from the Guard in 2005, I wrote a poem about the experience of being a sixty-plus year-old veteran of the Vietnam conflict looking back on my younger days in Vietnam and on events since then. It was inspired both by my earlier experience with hearing helicopters on warm, summer evenings and by a book about the first major battle of our involvement in the Vietnam conflict by Hal Moore and Joe Galloway, the wonderfully poetic title of which – We Were Soldiers Once, And Young – always seemed to me to be a line from a poem that had never been written but needed to be.  My  poem follows here:

 


Night Journey

The staccato thunder of an approaching
helicopter’s double-bladed rotor
as it beats against the heavy air
of a sultry summer evening in suburbia,
something that is felt as much as heard,
followed closely by the once-familiar snarl
of a tail rotor passing directly overhead
spirits me away to another time and place
so many years and miles removed from this one,
reminding me that we were soldiers once,
and young, and full of youthful piss and vinegar,
and like every generation gone to war before us
innocents, ignorant of blood and bullets, death and dying,
at least when first we started down that path;
And like those of our predecessors,
our minds were full of images
of the grandeur and the glory
of the noble task we’d set before ourselves
to do our nation’s bidding.
And so our generation also came of age a bit too soon,
and lost its innocence somewhere in the fog of war,
its youth abbreviated of necessity
as we sweated through the jungles, skies and paddies
somewhere in Southeast Asia.

The commanders who held our fates in calloused hands
seemed to us such old men back then,
and though our memories make it seem just yesterday,
the offspring of some of us who made it home alive
hold similar ranks and roles
in the armed forces of the present,
and are yet another generation’s “old men” at the helm,
though they seem such youngsters to us now.
And by the passing of the years since our time of trial,
we now can scarcely recognize ourselves
in our own old photos from those times,
and find it near impossible
we could have ever been that young.

And while the intervening years
seem to have flown so swiftly past
the realization has slowly dawned
that for every one of us who fell in battle,
cut down in the very flower of his youth,
still others lost their lives to war,
yet never knew it ‘til a generation later:
those who beat the bullets and the booby traps
only to come home as “dead men walking,”
victims eventually to every kind of cancer
and disease the mind can conjure;
they and so many others of our comrades
who made it home alive
have already now been taken
by this host of silent killers,
while the rest of us are fast approaching
the limits of the pathways paved
by what’s coded in our genes;
the dying part has always been what’s easy,
but for the experience of a bit of pain;
what’s hardest now,
as it was back then,
is to watch your brothers die around you.

But death deferred is death regardless,
and what we once escaped by skill or luck
awaits us still, though we know not where or when;
every day our numbers dwindle by another few;
and those of us still breathing are wont to wonder
if we’ve well-used the extra time thus granted,
and who among our shrinking cohort
will own the claim to “last man standing”?

It seems our honored dead are with us always,
and in the gathering darkness
I can see the faces of my fallen friends
and hear the echoes of their voices
now, as then, forever young;
I think my own face could have,
maybe should have – been among them,
as I should have twice been dead
But for a little extra luck or else
my guardian angel’s intervention;

Then with the fading of the rotor’s beat
into the deepening darkness,
the gentle summer sounds and scents
return me slowly to the here and now;
and the chorus of the tree frogs and the crickets
seems to softly whisper “Welcome home.”

L.D. Smith
Marine Medium Helicopter Squadron-161
RVN ’69-‘70