W.D. Ehrhart served as a marine in Vietnam and was wounded after Tet in the battle to retake Hue. He has published several volumes of poetry. The following is from _Just for Laughs_. (He has also edited a volume of poems of the Vietnam War, and his other books include _Going Back: An Ex-Marine Returns to Vietnam_.
"POW/MIA"
I. In the jungle of years,
lost voices are calling. Long
are the memories,
bitterly long the waiting,
and the names of the missing and dead
wander
disembodied
through a green tangle
of rumors and lies,
gliding like shadows among vines.
II. Somewhere, the rumors go,
men still live in jungle prisons.
Somewhere in Hanoi, the true believers
know,
the bodies of four hundred servicemen
lie on slabs of cold
communist hate.
III. Mothers, fathers,
wives and lovers,
sons and daughters,
touch your empty fingers to your lips
and rejoice
in your sacrifice and pain:
your loved ones' cause
was noble,
says the state.
IV. In March of 1985, the wreckage
of a plane was found in Laos.
Little remained of the dead:
rings, bone chips, burned
bits of leather and cloth;
for thirteen families,
twenty years of hope
and rumors
turned acid on the soul
by a single chance discovery.
V. Our enemies are legion,
says the state;
let bugles blare
and bang the drum slowly,
bang the drum.
VI. God forgive me, but I've seen
that triple-canopied green
nightmare of a jungle
where a man in a plane could go down
unseen, and never be found
by anyone.
Not ever.
There are facts,
and there are facts;
when the first missing man
walks alive out of that green tangle
of rumors and lies,
I shall lie
down silent as a jungle shadow,
and dream the sound of insects
gnawing bones.