The White Au Dai Comments

This poem is from an incident that occurred in Saigon in 1966. It was painful to watch happening realtime and there was naught I, or the driver, could do to prevent it.

Yes, this incident still haunts me to this day even though I've tried everything to come to grips with what happened that sultry warm afternoon. I wrote a backstop to this poem that is far too long to accompany this poem. The backstop adds far more context to the why and how it happened, including the aftermath of hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of Vietnamese boiling out of their shanties, tin shacks, ramshackle huts with all sorts of weapons in their hands, sticks, butcher knives, anything the angry Vietnamese could pick up as they attacked our truck, and how fast everything happened in the aftermath of this tragic accident. If this Vietnamese military police would not have arrived when they did, I would not be here today to post this poem.
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