Holes
By W.H. Ehrhart
Out in the boonies of Vietnam
while on patrol, night after night
you’d dig a new fighting hole,
every night in a different place,
every night another hole
like a grave, but not as deep.
On a company sweep, you’re
talking two hundred fifty holes
a night. Battalion operation
a thousand holes each night.
Night after night after night.
And if you had to take a crap,
and everyone did, you dug
a little hole and shit in it.
We called them cat holes.
You also needed to dig a hole
for your garbage, mostly C-ration
cans, as if, if you buried your trash,
the Viet Cong and the NVA
wouldn’t know you’d been there.
The Americans dug these holes
for seven years, more or less.
Hundreds of thousands of holes.
Night after night after night
from the DMZ to the Mekong.
That’s a lot of holes,
a lot of garbage,
one hell of a lot of crap.
W. D. Ehrhart is a veteran of both the US Marine Corps and Vietnam Veterans Against the War. He is author of Thank You for Your Service: Collected Poems.
