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My name is Dennis Seitz. I was drafted in the spring of 1968 out of southern Indiana, trained as an infantryman, and spent a year with the 25th Infantry Division out of Cu Chi. I came home in September of 1969 and went to work, married Linda, raised a daughter, and spent twenty-nine years on the dock at a grocery warehouse in Evansville. I retired last year with a bad back and a gold watch that runs fast.
I did not talk about the war for about twenty-five years. In 1994 a counselor at the Vet Center said, Dennis, if you won't say it, try writing it down. I said I'm not a writer. He said nobody's going to grade it. So I started writing things down on a legal pad at the kitchen table, and some of them came out shorter than the others, and Linda said those ones are poems. I guess they are.
These are not about fighting. I don't write about that and I won't. They are about the rain and coming home and the people who were there and the people who were waiting. My daughter Amy put them on the computer for me and showed me how this works.
If you're a vet and you want to talk, write me. If you're the son or daughter of one, be patient with him. He's trying.
In '69 it rained
the way nothing rains in Indiana,
all at once and for months,
on the tin roof of the hootch
till you couldn't hear the man next to you
and didn't need to.
We slept in wet socks.
We wrote letters that ran.
Mom said she could always tell
which ones I wrote in the rain,
the ink all feathered out,
and she kept those separate
in a shoebox with a rubber band.
Thirty years on
I have a tin roof on the back porch
because I put it there on purpose.
Linda thinks I'm crazy.
When it rains I go out and sit,
and it is loud, and it is only rain,
only rain,
and I sleep better those nights
than I ever do in the quiet.
They gave us a steak.
That's what I remember most.
A whole steak on a plate
in a big hall full of men
who hadn't seen a steak in a year,
and nobody talked,
just knives on plates.
They gave us new greens that fit,
and a ticket,
and a door.
Nobody told us what was on the other side of the door.
It was just America, going on.
A girl at the airport looked at my uniform
and looked away.
My dad met me in Louisville
in his good hat.
He shook my hand like a man at the bank,
and then he didn't let go of it,
all the way out through the terminal,
all the way to the car,
my dad, a grown man,
holding my hand
like I was six.
Linda drove.
I had been saying I'd go
for five years,
the way you say you'll fix the gutter.
There's a book at the end
thick as a phone book,
and a man in a ranger hat who helps you
if your hands aren't working.
Mine weren't.
He found Ray for me.
Panel and line, like a seat at a ballgame.
The stone is black and it shines,
so when you find the name
you find your own face behind it,
older, with a mustache Ray would have laughed at.
I put my hand up flat.
It was cool. It was September.
Somebody had left a baseball glove
farther down.
I didn't say anything to Ray.
I figured he knew.
I just stood there long enough
for the both of us.
I go fishing.
Linda knows. Amy knows.
Out on the lake after dark
the fireworks go up over town
and I can see them fine from the boat,
far off and quiet,
blooming and going,
which is how I like them.
A bass hits around ten.
I let him go.
He never did anything to anybody.
