I’ll Try Sir

The 5th Infantry Regiment Bobcats would die on any hill after
Colonel James Miller declaimed for the ages that he’d ‘try sir.’

The hardscrabble unit survived the hurlyburly of the Civil War,
the Mexican-American War, the Spanish-American War,

the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Afghanistan War,
the Iraq War where they fought in the second battle of Fallujah,

kicking in door after door amid the smoky haze. His unit tried and tried
and tried and yielded less and less as the body count rose, to diminishing returns.

The storied unit dated all the way back to 1808 but disbanded for good
after coming home from Iraq, after all the smoke and sand and sorrow.

Throughout the centuries, throughout all the blood-soaked wars,
the bedraggled rank-and-file echoed the refrain: “I’ll try, sir.”

Converted from a light infantry to a Stryker brigade,
they tried and tried and tried until they tried no more.

The Sniper’s Sight

A sniper zeroed in on the Iraqi in the sweaty dishdasha
perched on the dust-swept street by the disabled Opel.

“Don’t do it, don’t do it, by God, please don’t do it,
just don’t do it,” the sniper thought with swelling desperation.

But the Iraqi with the darting eyes pulled an AK-47
out of the car. “Don’t do it,” the sniper pleaded to himself.

“You don’t realize how close you are to death,” he murmured to himself.
You don’t realize, you just don't realize what it is you’re doing.”

Right as the sniper pulled the trigger, squeezed it evenly home,
snuffing out the Iraqi in a red mist, he questioned everything.

“Damn, why’d you have to reach for that rifle?
Why the hell did you do it? Why’d you have to do it?”

His relentless second-guessing and internal monologue
drowned out the roar of the shot in a deafening way.

Three Dead Bobcats

1-5th Infantry Bobcats boarded planes to Iraq fearing they might not return,
knowing they very well might lose life, limb, the very berthed boatslip of sanity.

The first Bobcat who died slid insensately down the hatch of a Stryker when manning the .50 cal,
after a roadside IED no one saw roared out of nowhere and ripped him asunder.

A sudden blast upended and toppled his heavily armored vehicle,
splattering Spc. Walker on a flinty patch of unforgiving soil.

PFC Reynolds, also a .50 cal gunner, hated himself for not spotting the rubbish-concealed bomb,
for letting the convoy proceed forward into an ambush that felt inevitable in retrospect.

A month later, Pvt. Alger was shredded in an abrupt hail of AK-47 bullets
during a misbegotten, blood-soaked raid that went south almost right away.

He was the first through the door the squad blew off the hinges.
An insurgent lay in wait, his finger hovering over the trigger.

PFC Reynolds regretted he wasn't the first one into the room,
wished he could have took Alger's place, wished it was him instead.

Sgt. Heston, the third Bobcat to die, overdosed a few years after they returned home,
faded into a pallid meat sack with a dirty needle in his arm.

He had called PFC Reynolds out of the blue a few weeks earlier,
fondly reminiscing about their youthful deployment, that heady rush of adrenaline in the desert.

He seemed selective in his memory, untroubled by all the collateral damage they had wrought.
He recalled the kabobs they had on post, not the botched raids, the innocents they rounded up.

Sgt. Heston sounded bright, cheery, nostalgic for a time that left Heston on edge
whenever a firework popped, a car exhaust backfired or he reached for his phantom rifle.

A flustered Reynolds didn't realize Heston was shooting heroin or how deep it had him in thrall,
later thought obsessively about whether he missed any warning signs.

It took PFC Reynolds years to surrender to the idea he wasn't guilty for their deaths,
to cast aside the burdensome albatross of culpability for those three bygone comrades.

He was after all a Bobcat, a soldier, a decorated vet with a chestful of ribbons,
a seasoned grunt, a tested warrior who was after all supposed to be a fighter.

The Town Theatre

Some Miramax flick inevitably would be playing at Highland’s Town Theatre,

Something quirky, offbeat,

some stylish crime caper or black comedy,

maybe something from across the pond, with that foreign sheen of sophistication.

You’d be entranced, sucked in, transported.

Then halfway through,

the red velvet curtains would close.

The sound would cut out, pop into silence like a record scratch.

The picture would freeze, then fade.

The projector would sputter out.

The lights would flicker on, startling everyone out of the shared reverie of movie magic.

You suddenly found yourself slumped in your seat,

staring at the eccentric knight armor

and Greek masks of tragedy and comedy.

It was time for intermission when the owly, Hitchcockian proprietors

would genially push coffee and cake on you,

observing some ritual that seemed traditional and was really just weird,

But that defined the place, made it what is was.

You’d rush out and beat the crowd,

grab a sad little Styrofoam cup of bitter dishwasher coffee,

decamp back to the alley and light a cigarette,

never knowing that someday it would all waft away like a plume of smoke.

Every reverie was broken, in the end.

Disney gutted Miramax,

and the spigot of indie movies got shut off.

The owners died, the place closed and the town snapped the property up.

There was bright marquee billing of how the town would revive the theater,

but some heartless old cranks who hated the mere thought of taxes

cowed weak cowardly councilmen into giving up on the whole thing.

Those bright lights that once beckoned you downtown would be forever dimmed.

As with intermission, the dream abruptly dissipated.

Only you weren’t just waiting to find out how The Fully Monty ended.

you realized people don’t care about their own town, their own community,

about the accrued weight of history.

You saw, as clearly as Sling Blade, Shakespeare in Love or My Big Fat Greek Wedding,

how little good lurked in men’s hearts.

Riders of the Erie-Lackawanna

You’ve been up and down that railroad corridor-turned-lush green trail.
You read Baudelaire and puffed away at cigarettes
on the park bench by Highland High School,
as dusk settled and strained your eyes.

The winding ribbon of trail seemed endless, expansive,
like it led to the whole world.
But you only frequented the well-worn length from Hammond down to Griffith.
You knew the pathway stretched all the way down south to Crown Point,
and idly dreamed of traversing the whole distance,
of exploring familiar but unseen landscapes south of U.S. 30,
of unlocking mysteries you never knew about the Region in your blinkered youth.

You returned to Northwest Indiana years later, after a long hiatus,
rekindled your interest in conquering the old railroad
that was now a roaring river of bicycles and dog walkers.
But 18 miles is a long way that requires a serious chunk of time
and probably some preparatory training you’re not willing to put in.

Weekends slipped away.
Chicago beckoned, familial obligations cropped up,
weddings summoned you out of town, you got called into work,
and you lost that sense of grand adventure.
You went out biking for nostalgia’s sake a few times, sure.

On weekends when the weather would warm up,
you’d see the relentless riders of the Erie-Lackawanna.
You wondered if their hearts ever swelled
with as much wanderlust as yours once did,

or if they clicked like baseball cards in bicycle spokes,

ticked on like steadfast metronomes.

Thank you JD Moffitt for contributing your art to Joseph S. Pete’s poems. To see more of JD Moffitt’s art click below. Moffitt was our Artist of the Month November 2019.

JD Moffitt web site

September Poet of the Month Joseph S. Pete