Three Shots

"Three Shots" is a poem that I had wanted to write for quite some time. I wrote it late last year based on an incident in which I was intimately involved. I did not witness parts of the incident and wrote based on others' accounts. However, a friend who witnessed what I did not see confirmed the accuracy of what I wrote. I have placed an image that he gave me in the poem's last line. I wrote "Three Shots" without moral evaluation; it is merely a graphic image of war.

Three Shots—A Narrative

We hear, “Get Down! Choppers say there’s
VC coming our way!” Behind a

rice paddy dike, a hundred meters from a river,
I lay,
peering over the dike’s top,
waiting
apprehensively.

The V.C.—
two young men in shorts,
stripped to the waist, with
no visible weapons, run out
of the bush into the open.
They’re 85 meters away. As they cross

our field of fire, we open up. In the
barrage, I fire hitting one.
He falls.
In exhilaration I shout,
“I got the motherfucker!”

As we move forward, the man
raises his hand and
head.
Is he holding a grenade or is he surrendering?
A shot rings out. Pierced
through his eye into his brain,
the young man falls back, still
alive. When he

reaches the man’s position, our captain draws
his pistol and extends it at
arm's length. Standing

over the young man, he kills him with
a shot him through the head as
the young man,
without words,
with arms outstretched,
begs for mercy. In a few minutes, after

exploding grenades in the river attempting
to kill the man who escaped,
we gather into squads and platoons.
Walking on,
we continue our mission while a
young man’s brains leak out
onto the earth.