There I sat, ninety-five degree weather Outside; the bookstore café, was cool. An Old Timer stood by me, explaining: “There were two-hundred of us on the Island, Near North Korea, back in ‘52— We guarded 16,000-prisners… “All of a sudden, all hell broke loose Three-hundred North Koreans came Over the bob-wired fence, in pursuit “It all happened in a matter of seconds The machineguns killed 150-of them That’s all I saw in the war of ’52. (One American wounded one concussion.) “Now we had to fingerprint them all!” The old timer said; exhaustedly; As if he was to do it all over again… But they were just old memories unearthed; Resurrected for a moment, from the Sands of that little horse-shoe island. “But I guess I’ll never forget,” he said with No regrets!... as he moved on looking For his table, where he left his coffee. #762 7/15/05 Notes: as a War Veteran I used to meet a lot of old timers from an assortment of wars, at one time, WWII seemed to be the one I meet the most from; before that, it used to be WWI (when I was a kid); very few from the Korean War (but now and then I meet one), and a few from Vietnam; where I was. Funny it seems, most of these groups are becoming more scarce, especially WWI, and the Korean War; or so it seems. Now we have three more wars to look at: Persian Gulf One, Afghanistan War and Persian Gulf Two (it seems, all in a matter of a decade); and I should mention, the Bosnian War, which my son was involved with; I guess I will not run out of War Veterans to talk to. It is also funny; we stop the longest war on record, the Vietnam War, only to replace it with the four-wars I mentioned. Oh well, that is life is it not. |