Veterans Day: Benediction
Raymond S. Kraft

My father was a medic in the U.S. Navy for four years during WWII, most of it in the Mediterranean theater, then on the way to the invasion of Japan in the summer of 1945, when the war abruptly ended. He was there for the invasions of Sicily and Italy, but he hardly spoke of them, only of the good times, dolphins leaping in the luminous wake aft of the fantail, stars slipping slowly by in a crystalline sky far above the dark Atlantic, the ride across Italy by train, sitting on the roof of a boxcar in the blazing sun.

He didn't say much about the battles, the hundreds of wounded men streaming aboard the hospital ship where he was stationed, the triage, sorting out who could be patched up, who went straight to the surgeons, and who could only be given morphine to ease their dying. Let the sleeping dogs of painful memory lie. He's gone now, and the old soldiers of his time just fade away. This is for him, and for all of them.

Our ranks grow thin
I hear the bugles sing
flags folded, given to
our widows, daughters, sons
bolts snap, the rifles crack, I hear
the volleys echoing

We who were called,
we, the legionnaires of fate,
into the crucible of fire and hell
to fight, to bleed, to do awful,
necessary things, we, the bloody
nemesis of hate

We flew and died
on laughter-silvered wings
we rode the armor rumbling into slaughter
waded into steel through crimson surf
saw bombs concuss, fell to their
fierce concentric rings

And now the caisson rattles
a horse without a rider walks beside
a generation passes, gentlemen,
to rest in that sweet earth we
fought for, then, or as ashes on
the blue and restless tide

We have nothing but
this legacy to give, a hope,
a faith, a fading purple heart,
and Freedom, Liberty, our benediction,
for those who follow in our shadow,
for those who live, those
yet to live.

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