Alwaysawarrior

1,320,875 poems read

SOMEDAY WHEN WE START CRYING




Someday when we start crying will we be able to stop?
Will those tears keep flowing creating a great river?
Destined to flow to the vast seas that we had crossed

Will those memories suppressed for nearly 46 years now
Take a toll on all of us which we will never recover from
Remembering the images that have tormented us for decades

The sights of the old men and women seeking safe shelter
To escape the constant threats of a hideous death there
Trying to understand as to why they've never known peace

It was the heart breaking sights of those small orphans
Those kids crying and lost just trying to survive this
With only a few nuns who cared if they lived or died

They were out there everyday begging for food or money
So they could buy medicine from the black marketeers
Hoping that they could save just one more small child

We were very young then too just kids ourselves at war
We missed our families and saw many terrible things
At nineteen and twenty we should have been in college

Instead we were being attacked with mortars and rockets
This wasn't the way that we had planned our lives to be
We wanted to get a great job and have fun with friends

Instead we were fighting in the jungles and rice paddies
We were at airbases & others patrolled out in the jungle
Searching out the very elusive ghosts we called charlie

We had seen the death and destruction at too young an age
You had to bury it at the back of your mind or go insane
How in God's name could the VC kill and maim little kids?

We all served in that God forsaken land called Vietnam
We had survived many VC mortar and rocket attacks there
But in the end we were just fighting to save each other

And after all the years that have passed we still care
Those warriors that we had fought along side with then
They are still closer to us than our very own brothers

Someday in the future we'll finally let it all come out
All that bitterness and the nightmares will become tears
Forming a great flowing river that runs down to the sea



© Terry Sasek - Alwaysawarrior - all rights reserved.

 

Dedicated to my brother warriors who served in Vietnam and
Thailand with the U.S. Air Force Security Police Squadrons
during the Vietnam War in Southeast Asia defending our own
air bases and South Vietnam's air bases too and also all of
those personnel who had served in the other branches of the
U.S. military and the Coast Guard and had helped to defend
South Vietnam directly or indirectly in that war, they were
the bravest people that I have ever met and we have all had
to bury many of those bad times and experiences that we all
had survived over in Vietnam and Thailand during our tours
of duty and you had to bury them deep into the recesses of
our own minds to keep our own sanity and perform our duties
in that war. Now after all of these decades that have passed
by we are just now slowly letting those memories resurface
into our own conscience minds and we are trying to deal with
all of the experiences we all had survived in that war and
hopefully some day we will be able to face it all and then
unashamedly we will finally let it all out of us and we will
let all of those tears that we had never been able to shed
while over there during that war flow out of us freely then
becoming a river that will flow down to the sea and all of
the tears shed will finally set us all free to have a very
long awaited moment of peace in our own hearts, our
minds and our souls.





























 
























































Comment On This Poem --- Vote for this poem
SOMEDAY WHEN WE START CRYING