There's a Man With a Gun Over There by R. M. Ryan

galloped, we galloped all three;
    The young girls with the snapping flags behind them and the rattle of the drum to their left watch their boys group and regroup. The girls in their tight uniform blouses and ascots. Saluting as the boys pass. Their breasts cinched into pointed brassieres that make their chests look like twin traffic cones.
    They’re the Angel Flight, but is anyone really thinking of what angels might have to do with the military? Is anyone really thinking of death this spring afternoon?
    I sprang to the stirrup, and Joris, and he;
    I galloped, Dirck galloped, we galloped all three . . .
    Boom, boom, snare

    Ah, yes, 1968. Nineteen sixty-eight is the year of Khe Sanh and the Tet Offensive and the First Battle of Saigon.
    Does anyone remember those battles anymore?
    â€œA cold, gray fog lifts on the bodies of American soldiers killed at the perimeter of Khe Sanh, Walter,” John Laurence of CBS says on The Nightly News .
    Those were the monsters, I suppose, but they were a long way from Maple Street, weren’t they? They couldn’t come here, could they?

    I don’t know that my graduate school draft deferment is coming to an end while I amble along Maple Street toward the university, though I’m sad. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot the night before, and that troubles me a little. Like many other people my age I’ve sat around singing “We Shall Overcome.” I’m in favor of integration, but, truth be told, I haven’t done much about civil rights except be sentimental, so I am having an appropriately sentimental moment as I walk along Maple Street toward the university. Vietnam and the struggle for civil rights are a long way off.
    Yes, I am walking west from my little apartment, carrying my yellow, college-ruled notebook and a copy of The Form and Theory of Poetry by Paul Fussell.
    I think I’m going to be a poet, but the world has other plans.
    Ah yes, 1968: that Tilt-A-Whirl of a year is stopping to pick me up.
    Oh I almost forgot: the Big Mac was introduced nationwide in 1968. America was at war, and it was getting fatter, too.

25.
    A h, graduate school. I’d arrived there in the fall of 1967. I was in the writing program, and that attracted women, so even though I’m engaged to marry Jenny Gleason I began trying to sleep with as many women as I can. Hey, it’s right after the Summer of Love, isn’t it? I felt like it was my turn.
    I also began meeting real poets. Jim Dickey, who would later be famous as the author of the novel Deliverance, came to Fayetteville as a visiting writer that fall. He liked my poems, but mostly what we did was get drunk in his hotel room and call various women he knew. Once they came on the line, he would say something like, “There should only be joy, joy, joy in the world,” and then he’d shake his head and make a kind of wattling noise.
    In 1969, not long before I went in the army, I drove Allen Ginsberg and his friend Peter Orlovsky around. My 1967 Chevelle had something called a reverberator installed under the dash. It changed the sound of the radio with its single control knob. Initially, it produced a crude stereo effect, but, as you turned the knob, it created the sound of an echo chamber. Songs like The Rolling Stones’s “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” sounded like something sung deep in a cave. The song came out as “I-I-I Ca-Ca-Can’t-Can’t Ge-ge-ge-get-get-get No-No-No Sat-Sat-sat-satis-satis-satis-satisfaction.”
    If you turned the unit all the way up, that line—and, in fact, the whole song—became one consonant stuttered out: “N-n-n-n-n-n-n-n-n-n-n.”
    Peter loved that unit and kept fiddling with it as I drove him and Allen around.
    â€œThis is all the poetry we need,” Peter said over and over.

    Oh yes, did I mention that one of my girlfriends kind of hung around after I got married?
    Did I mention that?
    I didn’t mean to have