WARRIOR'S FEVER
Exposed on crumbling paddy dikes, keep full alert for punji spikes,
Detonators, wires so thin, that trip the booby traps again,
Those send us flying face down, drowning in the mud.
Once again we wonder why, as flames burst up from mud to sky,
We face this every endless day, and each time out a price to pay,
Our troopers dying twisted, screaming soaked in blood.
Our orders take us out again, departing youth, returning men
But tropic war to first survive, if we at last return alive
To the homes we left a few short months ago.
We sing Malaria's song again; it crashes through our reeling brains,
It leads us down forbidden ways from the homes we left just barely days,
And yet ten thousand fevered years before.
The sun is anger overhead; damp tropic heat can strike us dead
When staring out of burning eyes, with no time to acclimatize,
We shoulder monstrous packs and stagger off.
On senseless walks we call patrol, to reach some map point named our goal,
And crossing some forsaken ground, a squad mate crumples, hammered down,
Too far to hear the sniper's rifle cough.
It might have been the heat we know, that left him thus to live no more,
A friend who just the night last gone, talked and joked with us till dawn,
Burnt off the mist and smeared the skies with red.
A man with dreams of cars and girls, who knew so little of the world,
His friends will start his journey home, decaying flesh and broken bones
Carried off in a dripping poncho, dead.
But soldiers die in wars; you know, the bullet's just one way to go.
There's pestilence and new disease, awaiting opportunity
To shatter minds and do our bodies harm.
Shivering, fevered, as we fight, Plasmodium needs just one night,
To waste the flesh from off our bones, to bake our brains and send us home,
In uniform, to prove we bought the farm.
The basics rule the soldier's life, sharper far than any knife,
When pinned by ambush, strafed by thirst, adrenaline pumping out in spurts,
Dries mouth and throat as fiercely as the sun.
With canteens empty, ammo low, the resupply too deathly slow,
Just meters through the jungle hell, a thatched-hut village, hand dug well,
We wait and dehydrate till Charlie runs.
At last the holdout village falls, we fight for shade and hear the calls,
Line up for water, squad by squad, we pour it down and bear the cramps, oh, God,
Who cares if it's polluted, makes us sick.
Exhausted by the daylong fight, we shiver through the torrid night,
Watching through the hostile dark, while retinas flash with fever sparks,
Oh, fly us out at daybreak, make it quick.
But first light brings another goal, another march to test our souls,
Another village seized and burned, another worthless checkpoint turned,
While colonels fly in cool air high above.
Another day in wet and muck, to test our fading warrior's luck,
One step and then another one while eyes burn hot as Asian sun,
And the fever burns then cools us with its love.
The water's gone, canteens are dry, the pack's weight smashes trembling thighs,
The muscles ripped by fever's pain, step up and forward once again,
100 vertical meters, pushing on.
On line beneath the monsoon skies, swift forward rushes, time to die,
Then flame and smoke from burning sheds low hanging, reeking, orange- red,
Bring flashbacks of that now long-distant dawn.
Before this operation's start, when CP pills cooled fever's torch,
When those that died today still walked, still held the future, cursed and talked,
When ordered out on one more senseless raid.
To find elusive foes in black, to hunt them, kill them, push them back,
Beyond some lines drawn dark on maps, where fever's concert ends with "Taps",
And one time more the soldier's duty's paid.
Snapped sudden back to task at hand, the pipers play in fever's band,
The War March of Malaria, that burning, chilling aria,
Keep firing, keep their heads down and advance.
There's safety past the open ground, to rest and let the arteries pound,
While red cells burst and neurons split, alive once more, not hurt, not hit,
And fever whispers darkly, "Come and dance."
Then in the dusk the hated words, in lightning, from the hovering bird,
Dig in; tonight you'll hold this ground, the enemy's out here all around.
When he comes back, we'll ambush. (Quiet, hold your breath.)
The colonel's plan, the colonel's glee, is death for troopers such as we,
We'll burn with fever while we toil, digging deep in foreign soil,
His the glorious victory, (ours the glorious death.)
The plan proves out in shell-lit night, we break the charge and win the fight,
Both sides police their torn and dead, while fever whispers through my head,
"Welcome, trooper, to the Rue sans joie."
"Here's your fortune, truly told, no star of silver, bronze or gold,
"Just a heart or maybe two, while fever burns your body through,
"To forge a dark, fell warrior from a boy."
Red hot the forge, white hot the coal, that purifies the trooper's soul
And sends him stalking down the path of no return that none can pass,
And then return still sane.
While fever pipes in front of you, Falciparum's haunting chilling tune,
Slink down the path from front to back, Malariae to walk your slack,
With nothing left to lose but life to gain.
Sad truth is that we lost that war, that bitter fight 'neath tropic stars.
Beaten by small Asian men, who cost us one while we killed ten,
Until his price became too dear to pay.
But it was fever's swift attack, hurled out from paddy waters black,
And streams that ran beneath the trees, of trackless triple canopy
That hurt us most of all by night and day.
Though time has healed the wounds of flesh, the mind, the mind remembers yet,
The hurt and pain, the lurking fear, the solace found in comrades near,
The ones we buried deep in Asian mud.
And now so softly on the wind, the fever whispers, "Come, old friend,
Let's be away to foreign wars. I'll sing to you on foreign shores,
Oh feel the warrior's fever boiling in your blood!"
Then once more with the storm and steel, to tread the foe beneath our heels,
Again to dare the deeds of war, while round our brains the fever roars,
"If the fever's high enough there is no pain."
Then is it war lust, bane of men, or just Plasmodium once again,
That brings the dreams of "Sturm und Drang, or lies my old friend Vivax sang,
The war songs of the fever, raging through my brain.
It doesn't matter in the end. Which ever, welcome back old friend,
The warrior's fever born in mud, cradled in steel, christened in blood,
Oh, listen to the fever song, boiling in your brain.
The old reactions, quick re-learned, the tearing pack straps, eyes that burn,
The aching marches, endless nights, the fevered dreams and fevered fights,
Once you've had the fever, it never quite goes 'way.
Hear the war songs of the fever, marching through your brain.