Five Poems in Response to Ken Burns’ and Lynn Novick’s “The Vietnam War” Documentary
Pre-Viet-View
It was the most televised war in history, but I wonder if they’ll show that one photograph with all its bruising spread across TV screens like ink, like mud, like shrimp paste in rice, like the names they keep holding hostage one released POW at a time.
The photo I talk of bares a woman, some would say just a girl, with albacore-fleshy body, taut legs splayed, spindly arms flopped overhead, plastic draped over her torso: spat upon, laughed over, wearing a hole in her forehead, leaking black plasma.
In the middle of the road, men stand a few yards from her: soldiers, elders, brothers, cousins, passersby, grinning into their ciggies, telling the army photographer that there’s nothing like the smell of cold VC cunt.
If ever there were a way to get that smell out of my eyes, I’d kill my own father with a hand grenade, hugging him like the son he never knew.
Crouching in my own version of a foxhole, I ask myself whether I could, whether I would, stand there over that dead girl’s body and smirk and laugh because, hell, aren’t we all just a little bit curious?
Missing You
I hate you and I miss you, but war is all I know, and we all know it keeps its promises: the same slashed faces scarred over different names.
How hard is the rain gonna fall, you ask? Depends on how thick the soles on your boots are. Because the rain is not what should worry you.
It will be the mud. It will be how deep your feet sink down into it. It will be what you leave behind.
What is not readily visible will breathe the same air you do, its lungs taking in the same volume, at the same pace that you can run.
Our one fear is of being exposed after one too many anomalies appear in stories we tell children whose beds sink ever deeper into the cold comfort we heap on top of them.
Welcome Home
All your metal detectors can’t detect me. One day I’m aluminum, another day I’m polyester. There are containers that simply can’t contain me. My motorbike becomes a motorboat in the blink of an eye.
We all saw your arrival from many miles away. Our eyes do not betray us in this murkiness. Our feet have climbed boulders, Our shoulders carried mortars.
Yes, your land is your Land. But this land is our Land. Come and go as you please. You’re welcome to spend your cash here as you see fit.
But, this land belongs to us — These nights belong to us — These fields belong in our hands — This rice belongs in our bellies.
“The last day before I went to the Nam we were in a staging area in San Diego, and this staff sergeant came out in front of us with a rabbit, petting it. He said sometimes we might get separated from our units and need to forage for food. Suddenly he made a quick move and killed the rabbit. He pulled out a knife and started skinning it, then disemboweled it, throwing the guts and bones in our faces. Later in Vietnam I saw an American civilian adviser to an ARVN group do the same thing with a dead VC woman, disemboweled her. He peeled her skin off and left her there as a warning to the villagers.” Joe Bangert, Philadelphia, Pa., Sgt., 1st Marine Aircraft Wing, First Marine Division, 1968-1969, Confessions of ‘The Winter Soldiers,’ Life, v71, n2, 07/09/71
[Author’s Note: The following poem is based on an account I heard in the fourth episode of The Vietnam War documentary: A 12-year-old girl was raped for two days and then murdered by American soldiers in the village they tore into looking for insurgents.]
2 Days
Big Boots were looking for someone, something. They yelled, they pointed, they shot. I was getting ready to go to school when I heard the smashing of pots and bowls. First born screamed in his bed and then all the neighbor kids started screaming, “They're here! They're here!”
I looked around for my bag, for my mom, for my pencil, for something to hold onto. Big Boots threw something at the door, it smelled like rotten eggs. The door burned. Their eyes were huge. Their teeth were huge. I could only stare when they yelled at me and pointed to the floor.
Then they smiled. [I smiled back.]
I thought they were going to spare me. For two days Big Teeth and Big Legs took their time. I could smell our chickens and pigs being roasted. I could hear knives being plunged into softness out near uncle and aunt's house. Big Eyes came in again to see how I was doing. They'd take care of me, their soiled helmets seemed to be telling me.
They'd take care of me.
Never Did I Know
When did I become your baby they threw over the wrought iron fence to safety? How was I to know my shadow meant your defeat? When were you going to tell me I had become your sin?
There are not enough white hats in this rubber room to debrief me out of my secret that I was the first to be lifted into that airplane inside a bowling bag stuffed with gold fillings and the egg whites of my eyes.
A chorus of wails led me through a trench that bisected a field of bones and down into the cellar of the embassy where my tape recorder caught the Ambassador and the Colonel discussing the contents of their warm drinks just before they poured them out the window and onto the heads of the chauffeurs lined up in front to ferry both of them out to waiting helicopters that carried body bags with no bodies, just encrypted favors in exchange for an official White Christmas.
My baby book tells me that no one on that plane dared touch me for fear of caving in my skin like a bomb crater slowly ripening in a dense forest where tigers once swam across a wide river to sneak up on an elephant whose insatiable appetite would doom him.
Why is there no Why? Whose lock of hair am I holding? What tune should I be singing now?