Burden

They carried everything they could (9)
Wiring, detonators, and battery powered clackers (10)
They carried the land itself (15)
The humidity, the monsoons, the stink of fungus and decay (15)

It was something that would never go away (27)
It was the purest black you could imagine (220)
You'd swear you were walking through some kind of
soft black protoplasm, Vietnam, the blood and the flesh (221)

I was part of the night. I was the land itself (209)
Eyes closed, I seemed to rise up out of my own body (208)
Just clouds and fog...everything's all sucked up inside the fog (75)
Just feeling the cold spray against my face (55)

It commands you (81)
Like a killer forest fire, like cancer under a microscope (81)
The grief took him by the throat and squeezed and would not let go (105)
You try to block it out, but you can't (205)

But this too is true: stories can save us. (225)