It is STILL THE SAME for a Vietnam combat Veteran and
I am sixty-nine and it has been forty-seven years since I
returned home to America after standing up for our flag
and fulfilling my job which was to **** and as a highly
trained Marine that is exactly what I did for 13 months,
taking many lives every day and at the end of the day all
that we could say is how many did we **** today?

They called us grunts and side by side we fought and died
fighting a war that we thought we could win and every day
and night it took all our training to survive and side by side
we fought for our flag as many of our friends returned
home in a body bag.

Seems like I write about Veterans Day every year and here
in 2017 IT IS STILL THE SAME for Vietnam combat
Veterans: we lived through the war, now we die at home,
we are suicide soldiers who beat the odds, but we die alone
without our squads, and we totally look forward to death,
so we can find peace and we can get some rest.

IT IS STILL THE SAME: we can never forget the eyes, the
death rattling sounds that our mind seeks to drown and
the labored breathing and vacant lifeless eyes of life loss
that we despise as we spend a lifetime with segmented
visions of memory recalling death and life in vivid color
images because with death and dying you never forget
the eyes, friend or foe and we still hear their cries.

2017 at home IS NOT THE SAME for there are those who
refuse to stand for our flag and continue to disrespect our
country and those who fought and died for it and to those
who choose not to stand can just get out of my land that
I stood up and fought for called America.
                                          Jon York   2017
                                    USMC Vietnam 69-70