Maybe he’s driving the Jeep through the Vietnamese jungle
strewn with tents and men trying to dry their socks
and men trying to get the cigarette to light and
men trying to tune in the radio signal and
men trying to find the words to
write a letter and trying most
of all not to die in that
Green
country, or
maybe he’s just
holding the clipboard for the
general or colonel under the relentless
White
sun
pushing through
the saturated haze far from
Racine County, far from County Galway, but
either way the story is that my dad would get so sunburned
in the middle of the sixties before the summer of Love, with his
Irish
freckled skin
that they put him
in a Jeep and told him to
look busy, so anyway that’s how
being Irish didn’t just save civilization like
Cahill wrote, but how it also maybe saved PFC Madden
from sniper fire or strafing rounds so he could leave behind
the countryside peeled of vegetation like sunburned skin from Agent
Orange
and meet
my fair-skinned
forms at Walker Manufacturing,
holding ajar the door in the universe, just enough
for my sister and me, and now his fair and sun-screened grandchildren, to
Follow.
Halfway North 