Brothers

Dan stopped sleepwalking when he enlisted in the Army.
He half joked that God tied his legs to the bed at night
so he wouldn't get himself killed.

His two sons heard the stories; how as a boy,
he fumbled inside closets & drawers,
the refrigerator & once completely outside of the house
he awoke, began crying & awakened the neighbors.

When I returned stateside from Ankara,
he met me at LaGuardia. We opened one
of the duty free bottles of Wild Turkey
from my duffle bag. The other bottle was for Dad.
We spent the night in the airport in our uniforms
getting shit-faced before my flight home.

He did not tell me about the stripe he lost
for being AWOL until long after we were civilians again,
long after family & friends understood a part of him
was never coming home.

He rarely talked about The Nam:
Pleiku – a signal-corps-radio-operator assigned
a CO’s driver – Agent Orange – the “Yards:”
mountain tribes who helped fight the Viet Cong,
how bravely they fought.

He burned his uniforms in our parent’s backyard
along with b&w photos of himself holding his M-16
& a can of beer with a cigarette hanging from his lips –
just like Dad smoking a Pall Mall behind the bar pulling beer
from the tap for his customers.

Hair past his shoulders, often in blackout, he was free
to let loose the rage caged in his head; a rage his oldest son
refused as his birthright; a rage his second son, out of loyalty,
inherited. Steadily, over time, his last years sober,
his forgetting came easier & easier, his perimeter breached,
he surrendered to dementia, another defeated soldier
whose name is not memorialized on a dead patriot’s wall.