Elusive Enemy

by Frances Wiedenhoeft

Never the soldier
with the flag 
draped over my heart,

I looked for the enemy
diligently
in every bloody cavity.

I peered into bullet holes 
of eleven-year-old
Taliban fighters,
down the dissected gash 
of a known Al Qaeda operative
split lengthwise by a Hellfire missile,

through the perforated heart
of a taxi driver
turned terrorist,

the fuel of anger and resentment
like a bitter argument
whose origins are lost to memory,

blow through the market bus
showering remnants of women
and children,

they hit the ground with the soft splat
of a large raindrop,
a shoe here, a headscarf there.

I search through crowded bazaars
and vast streets
of abandoned rubble.

I thought I found the enemy
through the face of a friend,
his charred features distorted beyond recognition,

I thought I found the enemy
in the chest cavity
of a man/boy,

heart and lungs fenestrated 
by a bullet’s ricochet,
remote detonator grasped tightly in hand,

all of his blood 
cascading onto the floor,
leaving him a ghost.

In the dust choked
minefields
of Afghanistan,

somewhere between the Tigris
and Euphrates,
I found only an illusion,

deceived,
I found only
Myself.

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“This poem is a journey through many of my combat experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan and my attempts to understand these events and my role in the wars.” —Frances Wiedenhoeft

Frances Wiedenhoeft studied journalism and creative writing at Madison College, where she received a Journalism Certificate in 2015. Her work appears in The Wisconsin State Journal, the 2015 Ariel Anthology, a collaborative peace poem in Praxis Magazine Online, the American Journal of Nursing, the Spring 2020 issue of Deadly Writers Patrol, and The Adelaide Review Literary Magazine. She completed a residency at Write On Door County in March 2021. She is a writer, poet, mother, grandmother, and twenty-two-year Army veteran with service in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Desert Storm. She volunteers as a reader for Gemini Magazine.