wayne sapp

Wayne Sapp - "New Year's Eve"

Open Letter
Written to Jimmy Dale Still, of Bonaparte, Iowa
Killed in Action near Song Be, Viet Nam
31 December 1969

Jim,

It’s been forty seven years now you’ve been gone.  On New Year’s Eve, for Christ sake.   You could have picked a better day.  Explaining how you managed to die on that particular day must have been embarrassing for someone along the chain of command.  But that “truce” we were observing was apparently no more genuine than the reasoning for the war.  And no, I still haven’t figured out what that was either.

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