Infantry Assault
Poem By : Doug Anderson
Infantry Assault
The way he made that corpse dance
by emptying one magazine after another into it
and the way the corpe’s face began to peel off
like a mask because the skill had been shattered, brains
spilled out, but he couldn’t stop killing that corpse,
wanted to make damn sure, I thought maybe
he was killing all the ones he’d missed, and
the way they dragged that guy out of the stream,
cut him to pieces, the stream running red
with all the bodies in it, and the way the captain
didn’t try to stop them, his silence saying No Prisoners and
The way when all the Cong were dead, lined up in rows,
thirty-nine in all, our boys went to work on all the pigs
and chickens in the village until
there was no place that was not red, and
finally, how the thtch was lit, the village burned
and how afterwards we were quiet riding back
on the tracks, watching the ancestral serpent rise
over the village in black coils, and
how our bones knew what we’d done
