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<img src="images/huey.jpg">
The Flying Pigs
The Yankees brought their Pigs to Vietnam. Those Huey Hogs.
Those helicopters filled with soldiers, rockets, bullets, and bandages.
All the tools of Death, delivered by the Flying Pigs.
They came low over the treetops, singing Wagner and squealing, “Get Some!”,
Disgorging Yankees and their bullets into rice paddies, villages and fields of elephant grass.
A few hours of chaos and noise, they return and carry their destructive lot somewhere else,
Leaving behind the smell of smoke, death, war.
They would often anxiously circle above, as battle would rage below,
Hoping not to hear “Danger Close!” or the dreaded cry of, “Broken Arrow!”
They would respond with frenzied flight, belching flame and lead at the enemies below.
Sometimes they hit their targets.
Other times, they would dart in to land in an anxious, frenzied ballet,
To frantic radio calls of “Medevac!”, trying to keep the wounded from joining the dead.
As men lay giving “their last, full measure of devotion”,
And staining their steel bellies crimson with war’s demanded sacrifices.
Heroes until the fall, desperate families loaded aboard,
Rooftops crowded with refugees from three decades of war.
Most flew their final mortal flights, dropping, spent, into the sea.
Freedom’s promise delivered by the Flying Pigs.
The soldiers and enemies are old men now,
Gray hairs and old scars have replaced their youth and innocence.
New beasts of war have been made
Now, the Flying Pigs are forgotten, obsolete.
An icon of a forgotten war, in a forgotten place, fought by forgotten faces.
Many things are supposed to happen,
“When pigs fly!”
I don’t think enough people stop to consider,
What happened the last time that they flew.