Vital Signs   Tell it — our story, when we met and where, one hot day in Khao-I-Dang, we were still more or less kids, callow and careless but there in the glare of history, cocksure till sorrow taught us otherwise — tides of war, smells of suffering, of burnt hope, of love. Even now, some forty years on, there’s more life still pulsing in these veins, and enough of the old sass when we go head to head — vital signs are everywhere. If we turn each memory inside out, do we hear more of the music, the gunfire? We said right from the start: Yes. And what did we learn? Maybe it was fear and the end of fear.                                                          for Ellen     © Michael Fleming Brattleboro, Vermont October 2017