War Stories

Robert Allen

December 12, 2021

It wasn’t My Lai but the man’s cow was dead.

Family cow. Ox in ditch dead. Their livelihood.

Soldiers offered five hundred piastres for it.

Just over a dollar, my brother explains.

Living in the shadow of a court-martial,

my brother, a captain, was glad to get out.

Too much corruption, he sighs. Kickbacks and graft.

Goods shipped in for civilian compensation

diverted elsewhere. Ordered by the top brass

to say they were stolen, he wouldn’t sign off.

It’s worse today in Iraq, he continues.

Corporations run it, this business of war.

And a letter writer complains that the news

ignores the soldier handing out chocolate bars.

Robert Allen is retired and lives in San Antonio with his wife, two children, five antique clocks, and five cats. He has poems in Voices de la Luna, Texas Poetry Calendar, Writers Take a Walk, and Poetry on the Move. He co-facilitates Gemini Ink's Open Writer's Lab.