Bombing
Vietnam
Good old
Joe,
a hell of a
pilot you were.
You was my
friend,
you was a
big child,
all heart,
stupid as paint, sure,
but the feel
in your talented fingers,
your
far-seeing blue eyes;
you and that
plane united to kill
every
goddamned gook down there
living in
that green placid land.
I thought of
you,
bombing
airstrips, roads,
buildings,
villages, factories,
the whole
place;
it sickened
me and
was I ever
up your
big face and
down,
looking for
tears,
for remorse?
I’m sorry,
Joe,
best friend,
I gave you
love and respect
with full
conveyor belts,
encouraged
you
to blow this
green land
to hell and
gone,
so it’s me
and you,
doing a lot
of death.
Now you’re
dead, too,
burned to a
crisp
in your
crashed B-52.
He was Joe
from Muncie,
a bull’s
eye,
a real true
soul
who didn’t
think much,
an O.K. guy,
a
stamper on
American
roads,
and now he’s
gone.
Hanoi Christmas Bombing of 1972 -- Phan Ke An
Muncie is a small American city in Indiana, about 50 mi (80 km) northeast of Indianapolis. It was named after a clan of the Lenape tribe t hat founded the village in the 1790s. Robert Staughton Lynd and his wife Helen Merrell Lynd regarded it as a typical middle-American community and studied it extensively, leading to 2 important sociological books, "Middletown: A Study in Contemporary American Culture" (1929) and "Middletown in Transition: A Study in Cultural Conflicts" (1937). She also wrote "Shame and the Search for Identity," in which she theorized that the ones most likely to feel shame are members of minority cultures who are made to feel ‘inappropriate’ by the norms of a dominant culture.
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