Between New Year's Day and Tết Nguyên Đán
I have been thinking about poetry while thinking about the time between the western New Year and Tết Nguyên Đán, Between January 1, 1968, and Tet, 1968. And, as with most of us, I have been thinking, always, at least a little, this week, about the economy, which I won’t talk about anymore. Unlike most of us, I have also been re-reading Bruce Weigl’s Song of Napalm this afternoon and I thought, well, yes, there it is. I, also, thought about what’s happening today and how I might have to put off retirement for five additional years (okay, I did talk about it again)...but poetry, poetry is about deeper concerns than this year’s economy or at least it is for me.
"Put off retirement." The phrase reminds me of the way we used to refer, and I regret this, pejoratively, to NCOs who were career men back in Vietnam: “Lifers” and “Beggars.” That was unkind of those of us who were tourists and draftees in the Army then and now seems even worse than unkind. Language, word choice, what we call a man or a thing, is always important. Poetry helps us think of words and word choice in new ways. I have been told (and were I a true scholar would look for the evidence) that the racist term “Gook”—much used on both the VC and our allies, the ARVN in Vietnam—actually comes from Korea.
There’s a story, of sorts, behind that: When the first ship bearing American soldiers landed in Korea, the Korean people on the docks shouted a phrase that sounded like “me Gook.” The Americans purportedly thought they were shouting “me Gook,” “I am a Gook,” and started calling them that. This is an absurd example of the reflexive and a bilingual joke since the Korean word for “American” sounds like “me Gook” and is similar to the Vietnamese word for the United States: “My Quoc.” Probably all of that is absurd and there is an even better reason.
Why absurd? Mostly because the Oxford English Dictionary traces the word back to 1935 in the Philippines:
“1935 Amer. Speech 10 79/1 Gook, anyone who speaks Spanish, particularly a Filipino.
“1947 N.Y. Herald Tribune 2 Apr. 28/6 The American troops‥don't like the Koreans—whom they prefer to call ‘Gooks’—and, in the main, they don't like Korea.”
Poetry. Poetry is essential stuff. Poetry makes us, takes us, helps us consider new places, new concepts, encourages us to revisit the condition of being human. Oh, it may make us laugh, may turn us from gloomy thoughts, but somehow, poetry takes us deep down into places we have never been have and perhaps never wanted to go, fills us with almost inexpressible joy or exposes us to a reality we might have preferred to avoid.
It is not always EASY because life is not always easy, and for the same reasons, it is not always pleasant; it does not fit on a Hallmark card. Weigl reminds me, whenever I read his poems, that sometimes the thickets of our lives are deep, dark and gloomy. Frost is right: “The woods ARE lovely / Dark and Deep” and, yes, “[we do] have promises to keep,” but Weigl forces us to realize that we should not ignore the Dark and Deep part of that beautiful poem, and that, yes, “The lie [hidden behind the beauty of the words] works only as long as it takes to speak / and the girl runs / only as far as the napalm allows.” I will not share more of Weigl’s poem except that “…Nothing / can change that, she is burned behind my eyes / and not your good love and not the rain-swept air / and not the jungle-green / pasture unfolding before us can deny it.”
I am, I suppose, avoiding writing about what happened between the two New Year’s days: ours and theirs. Nothing of what most people would consider “poetic” happened in those days. We worked, we slept, we taught at our little school, we hitched rides downtown or not. We were bored a whole lot. We kept up with the news. We read in the newspapers, saw on television, that General William C. Westmoreland thought the VC were in retreat, that they would be unable to mount any kind of sustained attack again. And we began to translate some odd messages.
Showing posts with label war poetry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label war poetry. Show all posts
Monday, January 24, 2011
Sunday, December 19, 2010
Just a Few Notes About Vietnam (Part 14)
I Come Under Attack by the VC Air Force
The School was good and very much worthwhile, but the war did continue and we had our normal activities. I’d like, just for a moment to revisit guard duty—mostly because guard duty for us was not very much like the guard duty I have read about in hundreds of Vietnam memoirs and novels. Guard duty in a grunt unit was something very serious. Now, on the matter of Grunt guard duty, I cannot speak from experience and I suspect much of what I have read is exaggerated. Is it possible that our boys in camouflaged green clothing did not have flood lights pointed out from their camps so they could easily spot the guys in black PJs? Didn’t they all have colleagues viciously killed by sneaky VC because they nodded off a bit? That certainly was not how it was for me when I stood perimeter guard on Engineer Hill, but that's what I've read, so it must (in reverse Panglossian logic) be true.
Sidebar: What is a grunt?
Believe me, the only thing I know about this is from my reading and from the this is no shit war stories I have heard and read. And,m of course, there is the "MILTERMS" dictionary on the Internet: A US Army soldier - sometimes, but not always, specifically refers to an infantryman. Folklore has it that GRUNT was originally an acronym of Government Reject - Unfit for Normal Training.
I wrote a poem once about the East St. Louis guy I've spoken about before. To illustrate my own ill-conceived notions about the etymology of the word "grunts," I'll repeat it here:
Push-Ups
(Sgt. Smith, as the grunt's push up count went past 200: "He's gonna set the fuckin' batallion record")
That night, down on the floor
while we counted, your arms,
so fluid, pumped, stretched...
dropped your body an inch above
the tile, then lifted you so high
that something had to give--
the floor, the tiles, the sky--something
had to break. No sweat, just
repetitions, "100," "200," "299!"
and the you stopped.
I knew
why once: the time, the atmosphere,
the need to articulate something
that could not be grunted out
to prove something to yourself
and all of us. Goddamn but you
were cool when you held yourself so still,
looked up at all of us and laughed.
You lifted one hand from the floor, brushed
a drop of sweat from your lip, stood up
and walked away.
Perhaps other definitions: "the noise made by the RTO as he carried everything most people carried, plus a heavy radio, into the boonies. Or the sound the guy carrying the M-60 machine gun carried." Or the inability to express oneself in anything other than grunts. Kind of an insulting way to refer to the people who actually did the fighting and most of the dying, but there it is.
When I went on guard duty, I put on an old pair of fatigues, found my helmet and its liner, checked out my M-16 and filled my OD plastic canteen with wine, then strolled out to my assigned bunker. It was on the other side of the berm the engineers had thoughtfully circled the hill with and so was a bit more dangerous than being behind the berm. First thing we did on guard duty was climb to the top of the bunker (sandbagged metal container box that had been lifted from a ship— about the size of a small office cubicle with a smaller area on top that had a steel roof) and check the fifty caliber and the M-60 machine guns by firing short bursts. Then back down to make sure the Claymores were pointed the right way and armed. We did not test Claymores by firing them though that might have been fun to do.
After that, it was time to be bored, sip wine from the canteen, and stare out across three rows of concertina wire into the darkening night. Sometimes (well most times), if I had two canteens and enough wine, I would recite poetry into the dark after the other two guys at my bunker had fallen asleep. Usually, it was poems like Yeats’s “The Lake Isle of Inisfree.” It begins, “I will arise and go now and go to Inisfree…” Or, maybe, Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” which begins, “Let us go then, you and I, / when the evening is spread out against the sky / like a patient etherized upon a table…” Or maybe Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken" and wonder what lies I might tell my grandchildren in some as yet unimagined future. If I had enough of a buzz on, I would lift my canteen to the sky and salute, as old Eben Flood did in the Robinson poem, the two moons I could make out quite clearly in the near drunken night. Most of the poems were about getting up and going somewhere else. In the same way, the most popular songs sung by the Filipina strippers who sometimes visited us were about leaving: “Ho-o-meward bou-ound…I-I wish I wa-as….” I would shudder at the failure to use the subjunctive but did join in on the refrain.
I didn’t always wake up the other guys if I got a bit too maudlin or was too happy in my own solitude. You didn’t get too many chances to be alone and think in Vietnam. Oh, we all did think, but usually, in the company of other people. Usually, I would watch the stars shining brilliantly above me in an area that had very little ambient light not made by the floodlights in front of me, and think about girls I knew back in Beaumont, Texas, and in Austin. Those were, I confess, sometimes erotic thoughts if not downright pornographic. Or about my high school students in Silsbee, Texas, many of whom were probably training to come to Vietnam as I stood out there on top of a bunker. In fact, some of my seniors from Silsbee, Texas, might well have already been in Vietnam. I had a full year and a half of training before being shipped over and that would have given them time to go through Basic Training and AIT. A few might have flown over me as the troop ship I was on waddled through the Pacific Ocean. I hope that somewhere at least one of them is reading this.
If, as happened on some nights, the VC fired rockets, the other two men standing (or sleeping) guard would wake up and climb up on top of the bunker. We rarely hunkered down behind the sandbags because they normally fired the rockets well over our heads and into the Air Force Base…we were much too small a target for anything except the occasional mortar attack. It was an interesting show, though, those nights when the VC came out to play.
At any rate, the sun would rise--it has a habit of doing so--and I would go back to my hootch and go to sleep for a few hours before walking over to the Ops Tent to get back to work.
One night, though, things were a bit different. My bunker came under attack.
Here’s what happened and to capture all the gory excitement, I'm shifting to present tense:
My normal state of boredom and mild wine-drinking is broken, but not by anything I can fire a weapon at. A horde of wasps has attacked. Back in the States, I know, wasps do not swarm like bees and certainly not at night. But these are VC wasps or may be some other flying critters that only look like wasps, and feel the night belongs to them. Ugly things. Within a few seconds, they have taken over the whole top of the bunker. Why? Because I desert my post. I jump off the side of the bunker at the first sting. I know damned well I can guard the perimeter just as well from the bottom of the thing. Besides, no one except these wasps has ever attacked us.
I go inside and call the OD (Officer of the Day? Why does he work at night?) to report enemy aerial infiltration and he refuses to believe me. I invite him to come down and take a look. He orders me back up to the top of the bunker and I tell him I will be happy to follow him. He drives his jeep down to the bunker and, while he does not exactly say, “Follow me!” does climb halfway up the ladder before being stung. “As you were,” he says and leaves.
So, that’s the story. One night in the war, my bunker was overrun by the VC Air Force and I shamelessly surrendered to superior forces.
Saturday, December 18, 2010
Just a Few Notes About Vietnam (Part 13)
Our School Outside Pleiku
One of the more delightful things that happened during my tour of the beautiful southern part of Vietnam is that the commander of the Air Force base down in the valley heard that the 330th had linguists. Well, his hearing that was not delightful but what he did because of it was. You see, most of the Air Force linguists were not stationed in Vietnam. A number of them were friends of mine, had been to language school with us at Fort Meade: Larry Ferguson, Joe Newbold, Skip Keating and others. Instead of sending them to Vietnam, the air force sent them to Thailand and bases like U Dorn [SIC?]. So, the commanding general of the Air Force base didn’t have any linguists.
Nor, as it turned out, did he have enough “indigenous native personnel” who spoke English to fill certain jobs on the base. So, he called our commander and suggested that he might want to do the air force a favor and lend him enough linguists to train Pleiku folks who wanted to work at the air force base but whose English skills were not quite good enough. Our C.O. ordered us to volunteer to do so when we weren’t on one of our normal shifts. We were more than happy to do so.
What we thought was going to be our first crop of students for six full months was a hand-picked group of eight students, young men and women who were probably among the elite of Pleiku. They were, for the most part, well-dressed when they came to class and most of the young men had their own bicycles. They were quite eager to learn to speak and write the English language. I was curious about this and asked one of the students. For the young men, he said, working for the air force of the USA was a deferment from getting drafted into the ARVN. It paid better and they didn’t get shot at. That was probably true right up to the day when forces of North Vietnam marched into Pleiku and onto the air force base.
We taught five days each week but only if we were on the swing or midnight shift at the 330th. The Army, of course, came first.
It just occurred to me that I have not yet said that the work we were doing was, officially, in support of the 4th Infantry Division. We were not, I hasten to add, a part of the 4th, but were detached from the 3rd RR to support that division. When we were with the 601st RR Company, we were detached in support of the Americal Division but were not a part of that newly reformed division. That meant that our command structure was not through the commanding generals of those divisions but was through the 3rd and back up through the ASA chain of command to the civilian-controlled National Security Agency.
Nonetheless, the best part of my job in Vietnam was teaching English as a second language to young Vietnamese adults. Some years later, I wrote a Christmas poem, something much like an unrhymed sonnet, for those students:
The English class at Lake Bien Ho
laughs, shouts, sings Christmas carols
in broken English, sing-songy, tonal
inflections that do not somehow fit
in this warm, green land. A small boy
talks about the Buddha. Not long ago
a bonze kindled himself in Saigon, burned
with intensity, no screams, a desperate
song, silence fell on a noisy city.
At Lake Bien Ho the teachers
have brought a Christmas tree, presents
for their students: books, candles,
cakes and candy. They sit on the bank
and sing of shepherds and their flocks.
An old man on a water buffalo watches.
All good things do come to an end and our little school ended on January 29, 1968. We had already sent a message to MACV that the Tet Offensive was going to happen and our students already seemed to know about it. They were getting out of Dodge City as quickly as possible. We had a quick ceremony on the 29th and gave each student a certificate of completion. I can’t recall seeing them again after that day. I hope most of them got out of the country in 1975 when they would have been in their late twenties, but some probably got re-educated. That happened to a lot of former South Vietnamese citizens who worked for us.
The loss of the South and the reunification of the two parts of Vietnam is, I think, probably a good thing in the long run though I would have preferred that the southern region had won and established a true democracy in the country. A good thing? Mostly because the actual fighting, the killing and maiming, ended. In the long run that is a good thing. People will disagree with me and I simply don’t care one way or the other.
I do care, though, about the people I met there and the people I did not meet. We lost more than 50,000 American soldiers in that little country. The Vietnamese must have easily lost ten times that many. And that doesn’t really include everyone who died. Some died years later through suicide or illness caused by Agent Orange or some other reason related to our lost war. We lament our soldiers exposed to a chemical defoliant like Agent Orange but how much worse it must be for those who live there.
So, while I would have preferred a different outcome; I am pleased that there was an end…regardless of the outcome.
Friday, December 17, 2010
Just a Few Notes About Vietnam (Part 10)
Why I still Write About the War
--a version of this was originally published in Valparaiso Poetry Review and then in Coming to Terms (Plan View Press, 2008)
I can sometimes move forward without writing about Viet-Nam (the actual spelling minus the diacriticals) in my journal and then something brings it back to me: the way the water looks in the Laguna Madre near Padres Island, a cool breeze on campus, catching the silhouette of a telephone pole above the woods in my backyard late at night and mistaking it for a giant bird with a huge beak, the smell of peanut butter cookies in the oven, almost anything if it hits at just the right moment.
Almost it is as if someone turned a switch to the ON position and words begin to flow. Not always good words, not always the right words, but words tumble out. That happened the other day when a friend asked about Bruce Weigl and thought maybe he should start writing about other things and leave the war behind him, that perhaps focusing so much on Viet-Nam was limiting in some way, and I began to think about a number of writers who have focused closely and not repetitively as I am doing now, but often on that "splendid little war" that so many of us share in some way. I wondered how they could possibly stop writing about it, not why they should continue to do so.
When I walk through the hill country here in Texas, or hike into the Organ Mountains outside of Las Cruces, or stroll down a trail in the Big Thicket, paddle a canoe through the bays of the Texas coast or down the Guadalupe River when there is no drought, or return to my grandmother's home on Wakulla Bay and walk down sand roads, I feel more alive than I do at almost any other time, even when, no, especially when, I am alone.
But when I see these things, find myself away from other people, way out into the still waters of Espiritu Santo Bay or between lines of hills where I cannot hear cars on the highway or on a path hiking up to Dripping Springs outside Las Cruces, I find myself not exactly flashing back, with all the unpleasant connotations that accompany that phrase, but seeing once again the hills and low mountains of the Central Highlands in Viet-Nam, hearing the waters of the South China Sea at Chu Lai, looking again into a schoolyard in Pleiku and seeing a giant Buddha smashed apart.
The other day, I had to replace two tires on my Ranger and went to NTB, a subsidiary of Sears. The salesman's name was Jesse something and, as he looked out at the rains beating down on the parking lot, he said that whenever it rained it reminded him of the monsoons in Viet-Nam. I told him I had been there in 1967-68 and he said, "No shit, man. Me, too. I was with the first of the 46th, Americal Division. I laughed and told him I'd gone over on the USNS Gordon with the 198th Light Infantry Brigade, another part of the Americal. He'd been on the same ship. We talked about it for a while, all the time looking out at the rain. He's not a writer and he doesn't suffer from a bad case of PTSD, but his war is always with him, too.
Sidebar: Introducing a speaker
Back in 1984, I was a member of the program committee for the Texas Library Association and had the pleasure of introducing a speaker, a man whose name I have forgotten, a former diplomat. In the introduction, I mentioned that I had read one of his books while i was on the Gordon bound for Viet-Nam. He raced up before I had finished introducing him and grabbed me. "I was on the Gordon!" he said. "When I escaped from the Soviet Union through China, the ship that carried me to the United States...the same ship you were on!" A coincidence, yes, but a startling one. The ship that carried my regiment to South Vietnam was an old transport ship that had once been used during WWII and its aftermath. My story got blended with his and his story was, undoubtedly, a part of hundreds of other stories as is my story after his had ended.
I do not know how anyone who was in Viet-Nam, whether in combat or not, could avoid those moments or why they would ever want to do so. Some Viet-Nam veteran friends of mine and I had dinner just last night at Jim's Restaurant here in San Antonio (we do that sometimes when mutual friends come into town), and we talked just briefly about Christmas in Viet-Nam. That day for me remains hazier than most days. I didn't get drunk very often when I was stationed in Pleiku, but I did on December 25, 1967. Just something about the holidays.
I had poured a fifth of Ruffino's Chianti, the only portable drink other than beer the Club had on that day, into my two canteens and wandered down to the berm. I sat on top of the berm, and sometimes the bunker, and looked down at the lights of the AFB and the comparative darkness of Pleiku. That night, I drank until I drained both canteens. I shouldn't have done that while I was on guard duty, but the VC didn't care and no one else did either. I spent a lot of time that night looking back at people I knew and at important places in my life. I still do that, much too often as I grow older, but I was young then.
Sidebar: looking back
I look back over places that have had some significance in my life: to Beaumont, Texas, when I was in my teens and young twenties and fell in love with everything and everyone; to New York, still in my twenties and working at the World’s Fair when I fell in love with Sharon and the dirt and grime and soot of the area surrounding Times Square before it became a possession of Disney, Inc., which sanitized it; to Pleiku, Vietnam, and Nha Trang and what was then Saigon when I lost myself in language and in people who hungered for something they could not know; to Austin, Texas, and five years living and learning with people who shared my own love for literature but who also made a part of me on journeys into the Hill Country and wild canoe trips shooting the rapids of the Guadalupe River; and, back further, to the years I spent on the edge of the Big Thicket of Southeast Texas. All of these places and so many more shaped me and they never really leave, though for some decades now, they have been colored a bit with the red dust of Pleiku.
Nothing happened that Christmas Eve in 1967...just like most evenings. No one dropped any mortars in the compound. No one that I know of got hurt. When I woke up in the morning, I had a hangover, but no one got angry at my not being where I was supposed to be in "the appropriate uniform at the appropriate time" that morning after Christmas. It's a hell of a moment to have memories about — a drunken night when absolutely nothing out of the ordinary happened
But it's part of the reason, not just the anger, not just the violence and death, that I think writers like Bruce Weigl and W.D. Ehrhart and Yusef Komunyakaa and that conscientious objector named John Balaban and so many others can't not write about Viet-Nam or, at least, must come back to it frequently. It's always there, sitting in the landscapes of our minds, even for those of us who didn't wander into danger very often.
Since Christmas is upon us right now, I thought I'd share one of my Viet-Nam Christmas poems:
Christmas, 1967
The sand bags look the same:
a dismal green-grey bag leaks red clay
upon the bags below. Outside the perimeter
children pick though the garbage heaps:
thrown out waste of a thousand men.
Christmas in Pleiku, 1967, war fills
the surrounding hills. Across the valley
we see cloud puffs of artillery and
at night red, green, amber flares dangle,
shining bright beneath white parachutes:
December displays in sound and light
rivaling the staged events of a thousand
towns across the "world" on New Year's Day.
But this is Christmas: a time of truce.
--a version of this was originally published in Valparaiso Poetry Review and then in Coming to Terms (Plan View Press, 2008)
I can sometimes move forward without writing about Viet-Nam (the actual spelling minus the diacriticals) in my journal and then something brings it back to me: the way the water looks in the Laguna Madre near Padres Island, a cool breeze on campus, catching the silhouette of a telephone pole above the woods in my backyard late at night and mistaking it for a giant bird with a huge beak, the smell of peanut butter cookies in the oven, almost anything if it hits at just the right moment.
Almost it is as if someone turned a switch to the ON position and words begin to flow. Not always good words, not always the right words, but words tumble out. That happened the other day when a friend asked about Bruce Weigl and thought maybe he should start writing about other things and leave the war behind him, that perhaps focusing so much on Viet-Nam was limiting in some way, and I began to think about a number of writers who have focused closely and not repetitively as I am doing now, but often on that "splendid little war" that so many of us share in some way. I wondered how they could possibly stop writing about it, not why they should continue to do so.
When I walk through the hill country here in Texas, or hike into the Organ Mountains outside of Las Cruces, or stroll down a trail in the Big Thicket, paddle a canoe through the bays of the Texas coast or down the Guadalupe River when there is no drought, or return to my grandmother's home on Wakulla Bay and walk down sand roads, I feel more alive than I do at almost any other time, even when, no, especially when, I am alone.
But when I see these things, find myself away from other people, way out into the still waters of Espiritu Santo Bay or between lines of hills where I cannot hear cars on the highway or on a path hiking up to Dripping Springs outside Las Cruces, I find myself not exactly flashing back, with all the unpleasant connotations that accompany that phrase, but seeing once again the hills and low mountains of the Central Highlands in Viet-Nam, hearing the waters of the South China Sea at Chu Lai, looking again into a schoolyard in Pleiku and seeing a giant Buddha smashed apart.
The other day, I had to replace two tires on my Ranger and went to NTB, a subsidiary of Sears. The salesman's name was Jesse something and, as he looked out at the rains beating down on the parking lot, he said that whenever it rained it reminded him of the monsoons in Viet-Nam. I told him I had been there in 1967-68 and he said, "No shit, man. Me, too. I was with the first of the 46th, Americal Division. I laughed and told him I'd gone over on the USNS Gordon with the 198th Light Infantry Brigade, another part of the Americal. He'd been on the same ship. We talked about it for a while, all the time looking out at the rain. He's not a writer and he doesn't suffer from a bad case of PTSD, but his war is always with him, too.
Sidebar: Introducing a speaker
Back in 1984, I was a member of the program committee for the Texas Library Association and had the pleasure of introducing a speaker, a man whose name I have forgotten, a former diplomat. In the introduction, I mentioned that I had read one of his books while i was on the Gordon bound for Viet-Nam. He raced up before I had finished introducing him and grabbed me. "I was on the Gordon!" he said. "When I escaped from the Soviet Union through China, the ship that carried me to the United States...the same ship you were on!" A coincidence, yes, but a startling one. The ship that carried my regiment to South Vietnam was an old transport ship that had once been used during WWII and its aftermath. My story got blended with his and his story was, undoubtedly, a part of hundreds of other stories as is my story after his had ended.
I do not know how anyone who was in Viet-Nam, whether in combat or not, could avoid those moments or why they would ever want to do so. Some Viet-Nam veteran friends of mine and I had dinner just last night at Jim's Restaurant here in San Antonio (we do that sometimes when mutual friends come into town), and we talked just briefly about Christmas in Viet-Nam. That day for me remains hazier than most days. I didn't get drunk very often when I was stationed in Pleiku, but I did on December 25, 1967. Just something about the holidays.
I had poured a fifth of Ruffino's Chianti, the only portable drink other than beer the Club had on that day, into my two canteens and wandered down to the berm. I sat on top of the berm, and sometimes the bunker, and looked down at the lights of the AFB and the comparative darkness of Pleiku. That night, I drank until I drained both canteens. I shouldn't have done that while I was on guard duty, but the VC didn't care and no one else did either. I spent a lot of time that night looking back at people I knew and at important places in my life. I still do that, much too often as I grow older, but I was young then.
Sidebar: looking back
I look back over places that have had some significance in my life: to Beaumont, Texas, when I was in my teens and young twenties and fell in love with everything and everyone; to New York, still in my twenties and working at the World’s Fair when I fell in love with Sharon and the dirt and grime and soot of the area surrounding Times Square before it became a possession of Disney, Inc., which sanitized it; to Pleiku, Vietnam, and Nha Trang and what was then Saigon when I lost myself in language and in people who hungered for something they could not know; to Austin, Texas, and five years living and learning with people who shared my own love for literature but who also made a part of me on journeys into the Hill Country and wild canoe trips shooting the rapids of the Guadalupe River; and, back further, to the years I spent on the edge of the Big Thicket of Southeast Texas. All of these places and so many more shaped me and they never really leave, though for some decades now, they have been colored a bit with the red dust of Pleiku.
Nothing happened that Christmas Eve in 1967...just like most evenings. No one dropped any mortars in the compound. No one that I know of got hurt. When I woke up in the morning, I had a hangover, but no one got angry at my not being where I was supposed to be in "the appropriate uniform at the appropriate time" that morning after Christmas. It's a hell of a moment to have memories about — a drunken night when absolutely nothing out of the ordinary happened
But it's part of the reason, not just the anger, not just the violence and death, that I think writers like Bruce Weigl and W.D. Ehrhart and Yusef Komunyakaa and that conscientious objector named John Balaban and so many others can't not write about Viet-Nam or, at least, must come back to it frequently. It's always there, sitting in the landscapes of our minds, even for those of us who didn't wander into danger very often.
Since Christmas is upon us right now, I thought I'd share one of my Viet-Nam Christmas poems:
Christmas, 1967
The sand bags look the same:
a dismal green-grey bag leaks red clay
upon the bags below. Outside the perimeter
children pick though the garbage heaps:
thrown out waste of a thousand men.
Christmas in Pleiku, 1967, war fills
the surrounding hills. Across the valley
we see cloud puffs of artillery and
at night red, green, amber flares dangle,
shining bright beneath white parachutes:
December displays in sound and light
rivaling the staged events of a thousand
towns across the "world" on New Year's Day.
But this is Christmas: a time of truce.
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
Just a Few Notes About Vietnam (Part 2)
Sidebar: Had fun last night googlemapping the area of Pleiku we were in and using the satelite featire to look for the hill and the lake and the valley. If you want to do that, head west on Google maps to California and then due west to South Korea...turn south across China to Vietnam.
I am somewhat hazy about our arrival in Pleiku but have some recollection that when the cargo plane that transported us from Chu Lai came to a stop, we were shuffled into a deuce and a half and transported through the dusty capital city of what is now Gia Lai Province and was then Pleiku Province and on up the road to the small hill that would be our home for the next eleven months.
***
Engineer Hill, a scalped hilltop not far from the city of Pleiku, had an excellent view of the high hills to the west. A quarry slashed across the face of one of the high hills facing us from that direction and Quoc Lo So Muoi Chin (Route # 19). Not too many kilometers west of that quarry was the boundary with Cambodia. As far as I can remember, there were no other military units between our hill and that international border that would become a major cause for street protests when the Nixon administration ignored the imaginary lines on the maps and sent troops into Cambodia several years later.
To the east, facing home sort of, that same road led down into the valley. Heavy traffic marked the highway from that point on as trucks, jeeps, APCs and other vehicles headed down to the Air Force Base and through the town to get to 4th Division Headquarters on what we all called Titty Mountain. Most of the Vietnamese traffic was TriLambretta taxis and bicycles. The road meandered on past there to An Khe and then through the Mang Yang Pass, where the French Group Mobilment 100 had been massacred during the first Indochina war, and on to the South China Sea and Qui Nhon. We frequently read reports of VC groups stationed around that area but, fortunately, never convoyed through the pass ourselves.
Sidebar: Sergeant Stoss, our platoon sergeant back in Basic had often said he would rather be in back in Vietnam than working with a miserable platoon like ours and under an asshole like Sergeant Matos, our SDI. Stoss had been in trouble with Matos from the beginning. Probably being in charge of a platoon like ours was a large part of the reason. We just really didn’t care about the Army. Our squad was mostly ASA and National Guard guys. About half of us were college graduates marking time until we decided what we wanted to be when we grew up. None of us thought, at that time, that we would be going to Vietnam. The people with NG serial numbers were right. The other half was a mixed bag. That bag included the big guy from East St. Louis and the much less than bright guy from wherever.
Stoss himself was, in his own way, very bright. He knew six or seven languages at the gutter level and his English was fairly broken but he could communicate what he wanted us to know. I suspect he knew too much of the world to buy into what Lieutenants Bray and Cheka, our C.O. and X.O., were doing in their relationship with the SDI. They pretty much cratered whenever he expressed an opinion. He was abrasive, chickenshit, and had it in for our platoon (in retrospect, I don’t blame him very much) in general and with Private N____ (the mildly retarded) in particular.
Stoss called Allen and me into his room one evening. The conversation went something like this: Matos wants to give N____ a dishonorable discharge for malingering [not his words]. That’s bullshit, N____ can’t cut it…not smart enough. My English isn’t good enough. I say what to write, you put it in good English. What Stoss wanted to do was to ensure that N_____ got a medical and not a dishonorable discharge. We worked for hours until we got the letter right. Stoss took it to the two lieutenants the next morning; the lieutenants talked with the SDI; Stoss was transferred out of the company and probably sent back to Vietnam. I don’t know. A pyrrhic victory: N_____ did not get a dishonorable but also didn’t get a medical. He had to take Basic Training all over.
Some years later, I wrote this for N____. It was among my first published poems (in a small magazine called Kimera) and some of you may have read it in Foreign and Domestic (Turning Point, 2008) or on the internet:
TRO: Failed Basic: Training Required Over)
You simply weren't cut out for it, snot nose
in the snow, shirt flopping out, entrenching
tool back inside the barracks as we stood
listening to the dogs bark. The SDI, in
your face, yelped, and sent us all, tails
between our legs back up three flights
to help you dress again, load your pack,
clean your M-14, wipe dried muck from your face.
Eight weeks later, we left for advanced schools
and Viet Nam. You stayed, TRO, a second time,
lived another cycle, joined another platoon, waited
for spring in the Ozarks. I have always wondered
why those of us so smart went and you remained
and, if, deep down inside, you laughed.
I thought of N_____ and Sergeant Stoss a year and a half later as that olive drab truck dumped us in the red dust of the hill, a small red dust devil snaking around the camp, and we reported in to Major Shaky Jake, C.O. of the 330th RRC HQ.
I am somewhat hazy about our arrival in Pleiku but have some recollection that when the cargo plane that transported us from Chu Lai came to a stop, we were shuffled into a deuce and a half and transported through the dusty capital city of what is now Gia Lai Province and was then Pleiku Province and on up the road to the small hill that would be our home for the next eleven months.
***
Engineer Hill, a scalped hilltop not far from the city of Pleiku, had an excellent view of the high hills to the west. A quarry slashed across the face of one of the high hills facing us from that direction and Quoc Lo So Muoi Chin (Route # 19). Not too many kilometers west of that quarry was the boundary with Cambodia. As far as I can remember, there were no other military units between our hill and that international border that would become a major cause for street protests when the Nixon administration ignored the imaginary lines on the maps and sent troops into Cambodia several years later.
To the east, facing home sort of, that same road led down into the valley. Heavy traffic marked the highway from that point on as trucks, jeeps, APCs and other vehicles headed down to the Air Force Base and through the town to get to 4th Division Headquarters on what we all called Titty Mountain. Most of the Vietnamese traffic was TriLambretta taxis and bicycles. The road meandered on past there to An Khe and then through the Mang Yang Pass, where the French Group Mobilment 100 had been massacred during the first Indochina war, and on to the South China Sea and Qui Nhon. We frequently read reports of VC groups stationed around that area but, fortunately, never convoyed through the pass ourselves.
Sidebar: Sergeant Stoss, our platoon sergeant back in Basic had often said he would rather be in back in Vietnam than working with a miserable platoon like ours and under an asshole like Sergeant Matos, our SDI. Stoss had been in trouble with Matos from the beginning. Probably being in charge of a platoon like ours was a large part of the reason. We just really didn’t care about the Army. Our squad was mostly ASA and National Guard guys. About half of us were college graduates marking time until we decided what we wanted to be when we grew up. None of us thought, at that time, that we would be going to Vietnam. The people with NG serial numbers were right. The other half was a mixed bag. That bag included the big guy from East St. Louis and the much less than bright guy from wherever.
Stoss himself was, in his own way, very bright. He knew six or seven languages at the gutter level and his English was fairly broken but he could communicate what he wanted us to know. I suspect he knew too much of the world to buy into what Lieutenants Bray and Cheka, our C.O. and X.O., were doing in their relationship with the SDI. They pretty much cratered whenever he expressed an opinion. He was abrasive, chickenshit, and had it in for our platoon (in retrospect, I don’t blame him very much) in general and with Private N____ (the mildly retarded) in particular.
Stoss called Allen and me into his room one evening. The conversation went something like this: Matos wants to give N____ a dishonorable discharge for malingering [not his words]. That’s bullshit, N____ can’t cut it…not smart enough. My English isn’t good enough. I say what to write, you put it in good English. What Stoss wanted to do was to ensure that N_____ got a medical and not a dishonorable discharge. We worked for hours until we got the letter right. Stoss took it to the two lieutenants the next morning; the lieutenants talked with the SDI; Stoss was transferred out of the company and probably sent back to Vietnam. I don’t know. A pyrrhic victory: N_____ did not get a dishonorable but also didn’t get a medical. He had to take Basic Training all over.
Some years later, I wrote this for N____. It was among my first published poems (in a small magazine called Kimera) and some of you may have read it in Foreign and Domestic (Turning Point, 2008) or on the internet:
TRO: Failed Basic: Training Required Over)
You simply weren't cut out for it, snot nose
in the snow, shirt flopping out, entrenching
tool back inside the barracks as we stood
listening to the dogs bark. The SDI, in
your face, yelped, and sent us all, tails
between our legs back up three flights
to help you dress again, load your pack,
clean your M-14, wipe dried muck from your face.
Eight weeks later, we left for advanced schools
and Viet Nam. You stayed, TRO, a second time,
lived another cycle, joined another platoon, waited
for spring in the Ozarks. I have always wondered
why those of us so smart went and you remained
and, if, deep down inside, you laughed.
I thought of N_____ and Sergeant Stoss a year and a half later as that olive drab truck dumped us in the red dust of the hill, a small red dust devil snaking around the camp, and we reported in to Major Shaky Jake, C.O. of the 330th RRC HQ.
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