David A. Willson (i)

Rear Echelon Mother Fucker gone

My great and good friend David A. Willson, the Rear Echelon Mother Fucker bibliographer and novelist, died Tuesday morning, July 6, 2021, years late.

His HMO sent him home to die early this century. You are too old, they said, and we can only prolong your life a week or so.

The Veterans Administration said we don't care what it costs or if it only buys you a day. David went through the therapies rapidly developing for multiple myeloma,

one of the diseases of dioxin, which the rear echelon at Long Binh drank and ate and showered in daily. He sat in chemotherapy with one younger man after another

who predeceased him after their own later stupid fucking war. David blossomed and grew, writing backward into his life ending with a book about his childhood in a boxcar with his grandfather,

a veteran of the Philippine Insurrection, while his father was a counter-sniper on Iwo Jima. Happy, luminous, at play in this world none of us ever made,

good-hearted, good-looking, as rude as possible. That is me talking with him on a Veterans’ Day. I have been missing him all century and will never feel far apart.

This is the first Viet Nam letter of 2 so far on author David A. Willson. The second posted on May 5, 2023.

2 other letters discuss his poem The Frogs Are Gone, first on March 9, 2022 and second on June 1, 2023.

Viet Nam letters respects the property of others under paragraph 107 of United States Code Title 17. If we asked for permission it wouldn’t be criticism. We explain our fair use at length in the letter of September 12, 2022.

The colophon of these Viet Nam letters, directly above, shows the janitor speaking with poet David A. Willson on a Veterans Day.