Night Ambush
by
Robert H. Dirr Jr.
It is so quiet you can hear a rat pissing at fifty yards, but an intrusive
Heartbeat is trapped between your ears, like thunder in a bucket.
Anxious hours pass as you sit motionless, eyes dilated, staring into blackness
With index finger weightlessly resting on an M-16 trigger.
Trees ripen to the shape of humans and boulders emerge as crouched figures:
Apparitions of excessively keen senses. You anticipate the arrival of
The Viet Cong into the L-shaped maneuver, ordered by unknowing officers
In the rear who are detached and unacquainted from the things you do.
Someone trips a claymore and a barrage of firepower ingests the silence.
Profanity and bullets mix with screams and shouts of orders, while three minutes
Mutate into an hour and you blindly fire at the dark jungle, hoping to hit
Something rather than something hit you. A final shot and it is over.
You must recon the area and give the officers their body count.
You search for weapons and blood trails leading into the jungle,
But tonight the officers will be dearly disappointed, for all you find
Is a water buffalo with three legs and 27 holes and a dead kid.
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