Thirty feet of concertina, tangle foot, and mines.
Sandbagged bunkers armed with sixties, sixteen's, and seventy-nines.
Every fifty yards they sat, behind the killing zone.
Claymore detonators cross the fronts and each with a field phone.


A tower every half a click could watch with starlight scope.
An attack here was suicide that offered little hope.
Cobras dancing in the skies, their beauty takes one's breath.
As they make their way along this perimeter of death.


Inside was the safest place in Nam, considered pretty tame.
Impregnable in most every sense and, my God...still they came.
It was dark and down the line, the red flares lit the night.
The cobra spit a stream of orange, a futuristic sound and sight.


I sat there in my bunker with transfixed, hypnotic stare.
And realized with a certainty that someone's dying over there.
Confirmation came at dawn, the aftermath of fire.
Six bodies hung like strips of bacon draped across the wire.


Only later would I wonder...What made them try this thing?
It showed me they had great resolve, but what good did it bring?
There was no mistaking that they didn't want us here.
But what I saw that fourteenth night implanted my first fear...
Three hundred fifty and a wake up to add to running score.
Could I become a casualty of this bloody thing called war?

Copyright Randy Richmond 2001