...and from the same collection:

"Tell them quite simply that we died
Thirsty, betrayed, and terrified."

And on the subject of Vietnam in general, here's one of mine - not an epitaph exactly, but at least a remembrance:

"Where do you ride, my pretty one,
on your beat-up bike in the Saigon sun?
Party girl, party girl, do your thing.
Who knows what your love may bring?
Your ao-dai skirt and your stylish shades
conceal your hate and two grenades.
Help the GIs celebrate Tet
with a blow job they will not forget."


Jerry

Here's a way gay martial epigram commemorating the destruction of the Sacred Band of Thebes at Chaeronea. It is heavily influenced by my youthful study of Simonides, and it is the oldest poem in my published work:

For the Theban Dead

The Sacred Band is overthrown.
Lover by slaughtered lover sleeps,
and iron-hearted Macedon
sags on his bloody horse and weeps.

Engraved on a Lighter
(we did not send home to survivors)

In the end, I died
Face-down in mud
Like any other
Fucking animal.


------------------
Bill

HOW WE HEARD THE NAME
by Alan Dugan

The river brought down
dead horses, dead men
and military debris,
indicative of war
or official acts upstream,
but it went by, it all
goes by, that is the thing
about the river. Then
a soldier on a log
went by. He seemed drunk
and we asked him Why
had he and this junk
come down to us so
from the past upstream.
"Friends," he said, "the great
Battle of Granicus
has just been won
by all of the Greeks except
the Lacedaemonians and
myself: this is a joke
between me and a man
named Alexander, whom
all of you ba-bas
will hear of as a god."

Roger, I don't generally care much for Dugan, but this poem is a scream. For you folks who aren't military historians, Granicus preceded Gaugemela, where Alexander's 30,000 Greeks routed Darius' army of 300,000. Alexander erected a monument to his victory and used the phrase "by all the Greeks, except the Lacedaimonians." Of course, by that time, Sparta had precious few men to put into the breach.

In my little epigram, Macedon refers to Alexander's father, King Philip. Alexander, 17, and his lover Hephaistion led the flanking cavalry charge that destroyed the Sacred Band.
I've copied the reference to the King by his country's name from Shakespeare's reference to Cleopatra as "Egypt." And I stole the 'iron-hearted' from the end of Auden's "Shield of Achilles:"

"The strong, iron-hearted, man-slaying Achilles, who would not live long."

For me, it was beautiful to be young and soak up three thousand years of literature as though I were a sponge fished from the Aegean. Thank you, Peter Desmond, for initiating this thread.

tim and everyone,

this has been a remarkable outpouring.

peter d

given the interest in the viet nam war displayed on this thread, i am posting the URL for the William Joiner Center at U. Mass./Boston, which holds a writers' workshop during the second half of june every year. the workshop's faculty is about half viet nam vets, and vietnamese writers visit every year.

this is not an ad; my only connection with the center is that i have been a student at the workshop many times.
http://omega.cc.umb.edu/~joiner/

peter d