Ideas to do for Feature Article

I was thinking of doing the song - Khe Sanh performed by Cold Chisel:


I left my heart to the sappers round Khe Sanh

And my soul was sold with my cigarettes to the blackmarket man

I've had the Vietnam cold turkey

From the ocean to the Silver City

And it's only other vets could understand



About the long forgotten dockside guarantees

How there were no V-dayheroes in 1973

How we sailed into Sydney Harbour

Saw an old friend but couldn't kiss her

She was lined, and I was home to the lucky land



And she was like so many more from that time on

Their lives were all so empty, till they found their chosen one

And their legs were often open

But their minds were always closed

And their hearts were held in fast suburban chains

And the legal pads were yellow, hours long, paypacket lean

And the telex writers clattered where the gunships once had been

But the car parks made me jumpy

And I never stopped the dreams

Or the growing need for speed and novacaine



So I worked across the country end to end

Tried to find a place to settle down, where my mixed up life could mend

Held a job on an oil-rig

Flying choppers when I could

But the nightlife nearly drove me round the bend



And I've travelled round the world from year to year

And each one found me aimless, one more year the more for wear

And I've been back to South East Asia

But the answer sure ain't there

But I'm drifting north, to check things out again



You know the last plane out of Sydney's almost gone

Only seven flying hours, and I'll be landing in Hong Kong

There ain't nothing like the kisses

From a jaded Chinese princess

I'm gonna hit some Hong Kong mattress all night long



Well the last plane out of Sydney's almost gone

Yeah the last plane out of Sydney's almost gone

And it's really got me worried

I'm goin' nowhere and I'm in a hurry

And the last plane out of Sydney's almost gone

Don Walker (Performed by Cold Chisel)



And using the poem, Beach Burial written by Kenneth Slessor:



Softly and humbly to the Gulf of Arabs

The convoys of dead sailors come;

At night they sway and wander in the waters far under,

But morning rolls them in the foam.

Between the sob and clubbing of gunfire

Someone, it seems, has time for this,

To pluck them from the shallows and bury them in burrows

And tread the sand upon their nakedness;

And each cross, the driven stake of tidewood,

Bears the last signature of men,

Written with such perplexity, with such bewildered pity,

The words choke as they begin -

"Unknown seaman" - the ghostly pencil

Wavers and fades, the purple drips,

The breath of wet season has washed their inscriptions

As blue as drowned men's lips,

Dead seamen, gone in search of the same landfall,

Whether as ememies they fought,

Or fought with us, or neither; the sand joins them together,

Enlisted on the other front.

Kenneth Slessor