Remember: Veterans Day, Nov 11, 2009

Thalia Fields lies under a grey ceiling of clouds,

just under the turbulence, with anesthetics

dripping from an IV into her arm,

and the flight surgeon says The shrapnel

cauterized as it traveled through her

here, breaking this rib as it entered,

burning a hole through the left lung

to finish in her back, and all of this

she doesn’t hear, except perhaps as music—

that faraway music of people’s voices

when they speak gently and with care,

a comfort to her on a stretcher

in a flying hospital en route to Landstuhl,

just under the rain at midnight, and Thalia

drifts in and out of consciousness

as a nurse dabs her lips with a moist towel,

her palm on Thalia’s forehead, her vitals

slipping some, as burned flesh gives way

to the heat of the blood, the tunnels within

opening to fill her, just enough blood

to cough up and drown in; Thalia

sees the shadows of people working

to save her, but she cannot feel their hands,

cannot hear them any longer,

and when she closes her eyes

the most beautiful colors rise in darkness,

tangerine washing into Russian blue,

with the droning engine humming on

in a dragonfly’s wings, island palms

painting the sky an impossible hue

with their thick brushes dripping green…

a way of dealing with the fact

that Thalia Fields is gone, long gone,

about as far from Mississippi

as she can get, ten thousand feet above Iraq

with a blanket draped over her body

and an exhausted surgeon in tears,

his bloodied hands on her chest, his head

sunk down, the nurse guiding him

to a nearby seat and holding him as he cries,

though no one hears it, because nothing can be heard

where pilots fly in blackout, the plane

like a shadow guiding the rain, here

in the droning engines of midnight.

Brian Turner

From his book of poetry, Here, Bullet, about his wartime experiences in Iraq.

Remember also the family of James Clifford McKittrick.

They are still waiting for him to come home.

I'm still waiting to send them my POW-MIA bracelet.

Remember also Barry Lynn Brown. I escorted his flag-draped coffin home to his family.
Captain Barry Lynn Brown, Killed in Action, Vietnam, May 5, 1968

Remember also Joseph Ambrose, a World War I veteran, holding the flag that covered the casket of his son, who had been killed in the Korean War.