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Carol Case Field Manual For M67 Going through old attic papers, in the weeks after my father's death, I found a soldier's manual, dog-eared at the section on grenades. He had learned to identify each type, inspect it for defects, attach it to his ammunition pouch and save it for later. I grew up watching his every move counting down the fuse, dangling as dangerous as a grenade hanging from torn fatigues. Warning - do not attempt to modify a grenade, to defuse a grenade, to remove a grenade. Always assume a grenade is active. We spent the last few days in a bedroom-sized demilitarized zone let the dust settle, avoided explosions, and negotiated our way across the mine field. It took hours for the body to relax, stop twitching, quit reaching for the pin. It took days for the dust to settle, and it took years of silence to realize the war was over.
Carol Case teaches Language Arts in Mobile,
Alabama where she is pursuing a master's degree at the University of South
Alabama in creative writing. Her poems have been published in
Astarte, Touchstone, Will Work for Peace: An Anthology of Political Poems,
The Vanguard, Ordinary and Sacred as Blood: Alabama Women Speak, and
Louisiana Literature.
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