“FF Coppola may have thought he was being rad
And that’s bullshit
Being rad would tell the truth about U.S. atrocities
As SOP
Not some vicious Viet Cong anti-inoculation bullshit
But we don’t wanna think about
How men laid waste to a civilization
(And we got away with it!)
Marlon Brando’s Kurtz—
Maybe he went crazy
Because of what US command called for
Sky rocketing body counts—
The horror
The horror
Of what consequences are on the ground
From B-52 carpet bombing
The horror
The horror
Of search-and-destroy
and free-fire zones
The horror
The horror
That rained on people
In the form of Agent Orange
The horror
The horror
Of millions of refugees fleeing way before 1975
Their homes and villages destroyed by Uncle Sam who came “to save”
We can’t deal with our horror-making
We can’t confront the facts
We can’t reckon with what that makes us
Hell, does John Kerry remember any of that shit now?”
–from novel-in-progress, Our Heroic and Ceaseless 24/7 Struggle against Tsuris
