Veterans of the Seventies

His army jacket bore the white rectangle of one who has torn off his name.  He sat mute at the round table where the trip-wire veterans ate breakfast.  They were foxhole buddies who went stateside without leaving the war. They had the look of men who held their breath and now their tongues.  What is to say beyond that said by the fathers who bent lower and lower as the war went on, spines curving toward the ground on which sons sat sandbagged with ammo belts enough to make fine lace of enemy flesh and blood.  Now these who survived, who got back in cargo planes emptied at the front, lived hiddenly in the woods behind fence wires strung through tin cans.  Better an alarm than the constant nightmare of something moving on its belly to make your skin crawl with the sensory memory of foxhole living.