Dawn stillness broken by the swish
Then chop, chop of the rotor blades
Alpha plus Bravo Company seals off
The Northern and Western boundaries
We flop down into the Western perimeter’s paddies
Low as rockets and tracer fire spurt from gun ships
Sure do have the shits up us for over
The past three months 7,000 have gone down
I cut their throats, cut off their hands,
Cut out their tongue, their hair, scalped them
Croaks Vernado Simpson at the investigators
Who charge a third of our unit
Twenty raped, sodomized, one by five different men
Half the girls under sixteen, the youngest ten
Genitals stabbed with bayonets,
A rifle fired into her vagina
The ace of spades or Charlie Company’s initials
Carved into their flesh
And by midday 500 elderly men, unarmed women
Children — lay dead
And our sole casualty —
Someone who shot himself in the foot