Where Uncle Sam Is Buried

I went to a meeting. They read a letter. A member of the club went to the American Cemetery outside Manila to find the grave of his uncle. They found the grave and wrote a letter addressed to the club. It told of a twenty-three year old soldier in World War Two, captured on the Bataan Peninsula and led on the Death March without food or water who died of malaria in a concentration camp and never came home to Wisconsin. The family brought home word half a world and over half a century later. The old man who read the letter almost wept and the room fell silent as everyone realized but didn’t want to say they feared despite the sacrifice of a young soldier named Sam and all his comrades in the swamps and steaming jungles of a place so far away, that Uncle Sam has died and […]

Read more »

Road Kill

It’s war. The crew stood there with their shovels and rakes and the big guy walked up to the foreman and the foreman spoke first. “What’s up?” “That,” said the big guy. He pointed to a dead deer on the side of the road they were building, on the other side of a concrete barrier to keep them from being killed while they worked on the road from passing motorists who tended not to slow down or give much of a good goddamn about road construction crews unless warned and threatened with massive fines or the presence of a state trooper in a marked car with flashing lights and lots of radios and radar. “What about it?” asked the foreman. The big guy looked at him. The big guy had a wife and three kids and he needed this job. He could do the work of two or three, but […]

Read more »