University of Virginia Library

Pulled Trigger

Yet where his feelings left
off, instinct and training made
one last stand and he pulled
the trigger of his weapon. As
they both slumped over,
horribly mutilated, the young
man who had killed them
wept, and he wept again when
he told me the story.

He wept because not just
those killings, but Vietnam had
banished forever the ease of his
understandings. And there on
that rain soaked night, as I
gazed at the other young
Americans sleeping all around
me, I realized why so few of
them could laugh or smile or
glory in the beginning of a new
day.

For there is a special truth
in Vietnam as horrible as the
last death everyone wants to
avoid. It is the final end of
American innocence and it
comes to a soldier, alone, with
tears.