The Vets Are All Gone

The vets are all gone

who fought the Battle of Saint-Mihiel where
the American Expeditionary Force captured
fifteen thousand Germans and D-Day and
H-hour entered the military lexicon alongside

shell shock, synchronize your watches, and
camouflage, a term practically unused in
English before the war but soon bested by
whatever English had to offer as doughboys

prayed they were invisible to German snipers
with their scope-mounted Mauser rifles and
far from the frontline when the mustard gas came
slithering across no-man’s land through the

barbed wire into mud-spattered craters seeking to
kill and maim those in its chemical path, a road
not traveled by American aviators who dogfought
their way to glory engaging eindeckers and

dreideckers in rat-a-tat bullet-filled French skies as
the meat-grinding slaughter went on unabated
below among Heinies, Tommie and Poilus in
trenches from Switzerland to the Channel with

no room to maneuver but lots of room to be massacred
by machine guns and mortars when you went over the
top to face the enemy who would later counterattack
and become snacks for maggots as the only way

forward was to charge automatic weapons and heavy
artillery pouring down shrapnel and high-explosive
projectiles from heavens switched to hells above
and it would have gone on forever but Woodrow

Wilson got us into it and we went over, to make it over,
spelled the difference, over there.