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.
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