Views and Mechanics Publisher's Note Editor's Note Review of The Pittsburgh That Stays Within You Review of If Instead of Apes We Had Come from Grapes Review of Anson County Review of Dissolution of Ghosts Crossword (Solution Posted in July. Printable version in pdf format of journal.) Mar/Apr Crossword Solution Creative Nonfiction 1998 By Samuel Hazo Booing the Pope By Matthew D. Taylor Sgt. Robert Starbuck, USMC: Elegy and Essay By John Guthrie Shrink Wrap, Diet Cokes and a Kazoo By Sara J. Ford Poetry And the Time Is By Samuel Hazo In His Winter By Wanda D. Campbell Lester By Thomas Reynolds Generation Gap By Valerie Lauria Stanske Two Poets By Gary C. Wilkens Mongolia, 1930 By Gary C. Wilkens Fiction A Death in the Family By John Speeking Letters By Suzanne Abbot Among the Briars By Pat Tompkins Filling in the Angles By Jessica DelBalzo Miss Mary By Beth L. Block Cover Art Photography by Seth Brown About the Contributors © 2006, River Walk Journal and respective authors and artists. All rights reserved. Do not use or reproduce without permission. River Walk Journal, Inc. Board of Directors Chairman - Elizabeth Ross Vice Chairman - Joseph Koch Secretary/Treasurer - Geri Stock-Ross Editorial Director - Patti Kurtz, DA Literacy Director - Bill Mausteller Policy Director - PA State Rep. Jess Stairs Advisory Board Chairman - Patti Kurtz, DA Asst. Chairman - Dan Lachenman, PhD Samuel Hazo Christopher Leland Edwin Yoder Joseph Bathanti Journal Staff Publisher - Elizabeth Ross Editor-In-Chief - Joseph Koch Sen. Fiction Editor - Patti Kurtz Sen. Poetry Editor - Neeldhara Misra Sen. Creative Nonfiction Editor - Brenda Coxe Contributing Editor - Robert Dittman Publicity Director (PA) - Geri Stock-Ross For information about submissions, visit http://www.riverwalkjournal.org/submission.html. Questions about promotions, subscribers' services, and advertising should be sent to publisher@riverwalkjournal.org. River Walk Journal, Inc. is a non-profit corporation run entirely by volunteers. For information about volunteer opportunities and internships, visit http://www.riverwalkjournal.org/volunteer.html. |
Sgt. Robert Starbuck, USMC: Elegy and Essay By John Guthrie Sergeant Starbuck often visited the secret counsels of my night; “I am not dead. There was a mix-up in those body bags all full of broken dreams and twisted remnants.” Then in the cold mousy light of dawn I’d feel a certain guilt because my friend had died In that distant place where his blood, lanced free, sprang forth to the eager earth as the life force seeks the hungry loins of a lover. I’ve now seen many whose lives seeped away as they lay bloated with the sufferings of great age. Yet Sergeant Starbuck lives on, forever young in the keeping rooms of memory. No wrinkles mark his brow. He marches yet with all the strength and suppleness of youth across some cosmic plain where needless loss resides on starlight’s other side. Listen! You can hear the drums beat cadence, the riflery’s distant chattering. Go, good brave young specter, and trouble no more my dreams. ~ Bob Starbuck, my best Marine Corps buddy, got the heroic USMC shit shot out of him in Vietnam’s DMZ on the 4th of February, 1967. He was 26. Nixon, Johnson and Mcnamara and all said Bob and others like him died to defend us against Communism. Sure enough, Communism seems pretty passé these days. They have a stock exchange in Ho Chi Minh City now. Also, venture capitalists can buy a Big Mac in Beijing. The Soviet Union imploded. I was there to witness at least a miniscule part of that. Thank you, Bob. Thank you 58,000 other service men and women. Thank you, 3.4 million innocent Vietnamese civilians who were caught in the crossfire. Thank you, Uncle Sam. Though we were safe from Communism, Bob’s death and related phenomena troubled me – Bad Dream City for years. I became involved in the Anti-American-War-in-Vietnam movement while a graduate student at Duke University. Oh yes, friends; I was as focused and pure of heart in that venture as I was as a young Marine recruit. Got locked up in the Durham, N.C. slammer during the massive campus protests of ‘68. “Fuckin’ Communis’ hippy,” spat one narrow-eyed cop. Durham cops were not known either for their civility or their sense of humor. Antiwar activities took me to D.C. from time-to-time, but I couldn’t bring myself to hike over to read Bob’s name on that black marble “V” that sliced like a ploughshare through the earth of the National Mall. In the summer of 1968, my first wife and I went down to Charleston, S.C., our brief marriage dissolving around us in a like a lump of salt in a seething cauldron of immaturity and incompatibility. I was in the throes of realizing the world wasn’t at all like either the U.S. Marine Corps or the Southern Baptist Church said it was. She was in the throes of devoting herself to a life of service to god. She’s a Methodist minister now, probably a good one. I wish her well. I wish whatever god there may be well too, but think sometimes he/she/it needs to clean up her act. Counseling, maybe. We had dinner with Bob’s parents in their Tradd Street home in Charleston’s Historic District. They retired there from New York. Wealthy. Bob’s dad had owned a steamship line at one point. I sat there in that ancient house of theirs trying to eat the linguini with meat sauce his grimly silent mother, eyes glittery, prepared with her own bitter hands. All through that meal, Bob’s father, greasy tears tracking down his face, raved on about Bob’s death being due to an international conspiracy involving the Rothschild international banking family. Jews. From what I gathered, the parents went bug-fuck after attending their only son’s funeral in Beaufort National Cemetery. Officially, the Marines call someone who goes bug-fuck a Section 8. I realized at some point that writing about shitty stuff served as catharsis. Better than dope. Better than booze. I wrote the first version of the above poem in the mid-eighties. Leatherneck: the Magazine of the Marines sent me a check for $10.00 for it. This made me feel like Rudyard Kipling or a master of the universe or something. They never published it, though, because some moderately perceptive reader somewhere up the Leatherneck chain of command realized that even that primitive and hopelessly sentimental version was an anti-war poem. The poem and the check made me feel better though. Along with my gal-pal of the moment I hitched a ride with a pilot friend who flew us up to D.C. so I could contemplate Maya Lin’s evocative wall for the first time. I stood before Starbuck’s name and wept. That fine high-assed redneck girl I was with, she of the long straight hair the color of corn silk and topaz eyes, looked at me with consternation. But she had a generous heart and sympathetic disposition, so this unseemly episode was soon forgotten. We took a taxi to Georgetown. There, in a succession of hospitable and tastefully appointed Foggy Bottom dram shops and pubs, we funneled back enough Zombies that both of us became caterwauling, knee-walking, cockroach-kissing drunk. In Marine Corps parlance, disporting one’s self in this manner is called a Buzzard Fuck. For me all this is a quicky scar now instead of an open wound. I don’t have bad dreams about Starbuck’s death since writing the poem. The dead after all, no longer suffer. I think of him though. Especially when I hear the quotidian bad news from Iraq. Like when those 20 young Marines had their lives snuffed out one recent week. And I think of the maimed. And I think of the families. And I think of the innocent civilians. Does seem like we would’ve learned something by now, doesn’t it? |