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The Bodies Benath the Table (poem)

By W. D. Ehrhart

Hue City, 1968
(or was it Fallujah,
Stalingrad, or Ur?)

The bodies beneath the table
had been lying there for days.
Long enough to obliterate their faces,
the nature of their wounds.
Or maybe whatever killed them
ruined their faces, too.
Impossible now to tell.
Only the putrefying bodies
bloated like Macy's Parade balloons,
only unrecognizable lumps on
shoulders where heads should be.

The two of them seemed to be a couple:
husband and wife, lovers perhaps,
maybe brother and sister-who
could tell-but they'd pulled the table
into a corner away from the windows,
their only protection against
the fighting raging around them,
crawled beneath it-the table, I mean-
half sitting, bent at the waist,
close together, terrified, almost
certainly terrified, nothing but noise,
only each other, only each other,
any moment their last.

All these years I've wondered
how they died. Who were they.
Who remembers.

— W. D. Ehrhart
Marine Corps veteran W. D. Ehrhart first published poetry in Winning Hearts and Minds: War Poems by Vietnam Veterans,
published by VVAW's 1st Casualty Press in 1972. He teaches English and history at the Haverford School in suburban Philadelphia.