I held Jeff’s mother 
in my arms a long time 
downtown at the train station 
after he set off for Toronto 
rather than wait to be called. 
He couldn’t even come home 
for his father’s funeral. 
Sue’s brother Tom got exposed 
to Agent Orange over there. 
After coming back, after a time 
of looking and singing pretty much okay, 
he left us. His mother at the last 
slipped his guitar into the casket. 
We were still kids, really, 
with our official assigned numbers 
in a time of so-called domino danger. 
If Viet Nam fell to the Communists, 
that would only be the beginning, 
watch out California. So we were told. 
And Johnny’s father had died 
one Christmas Eve a few years 
before Johnny’s number got drawn, 
so maybe he didn’t know but to go 
where he was told. His mother 
got back a body bag—two small 
bullet holes in his lower back. 
Otherwise he lay the handsome young man 
he was before he’d gone to the war 
many of us marched in protest against: 
Hell No We Won’t Go! 
An engraver chiseled J-o-h-n 
up on the crowded, memorial wall, 
the one that dips below ground level 
as a sign of how futile all of it was. 
Lincoln looks over the names 
from his own silent place. 
Much longer than his brief time 
of going to church and school with me, 
Johnny’s “life” in letters up there 
has endured years of sun, hard rain. 
Oh, that hard rain still falls. 

—From Harry Griswold’s in-progress collection (working title Report from the Front); poem was first published in MacQueen’s Quinterly online (Issue 24, August 2024).

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