The Good, The Bad, and The Memory
War Poetry
CHAPTER 2
“They Say the War is Over:” Memory and Politics in War Poetry
“Have you ever read the poem [‘Insensibility’] by Wilfred Owen? The World War I poet?” Eugene
Sledge asks Studs Terkel.1 Terkel describes how the veteran closes his eyes and recites a few
lines of the poem:
Happy are the men who yet before they are killed
Can let their veins run cold.
[…]
Dullness best solves
The tease and doubt of shelling.2
The famous poem talks about how utter numbness or insensitivity is the only way for soldiers to
cope with the grim and cruel reality of battles in the trenches of the “Great War.” The other
escape from these horrors is to be killed in action, a risk of war presented as an inescapable
certainty in the first line and the fate that the poet himself met weeks before the end of the war.3
Despite the many particular references to World War I in “Insensibility,” Sledge, a veteran of the
war in the Pacific, suggests that Owen’s poem captures essential elements of war that are still
pertinent decades after it was written.4 War poetry can therefore be useful for finding meanings
of war in both an individual’s life as well as an entire culture.
Although war poetry is commonly associated with the British and World War I, Lorrie
Goldensohn’s anthology of American war poetry illustrates its rich tradition in the United States,
1
Terkel, “The Good War,” 61.
Ibidem.
3
For an analysis of the recurrent theme of death in World War I poetry, see for instance Christien Franken,
“’The splendid days’: vrouwen, mannen en de dood in Britse poëzie uit de Eerste Wereldoorlog,” Jaarboek voor
Vrouwengeschiedenis 24 (2004): 80-97.
4
In the 2010 Frontline documentary “The Wounded Platoon,” Iraq War veteran Jose Barco states, “[i]n Iraq,
you've got to be numb. […] You can't not be numb because if you're not numb in those moments, you're going
to go crazy.” Owen’s description of war clearly transcends time and space. See: Dan Edge, “The Wounded
Platoon.” PBS Frontline. May 18, 2010. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/woundedplatoon/
etc/script.html. Last visited: August 5, 2010. That veterans use similar words and phrases to describe wartime
experiences in different wars is convincingly illustrated in Eric Dean’s 1997 Shook over Hell: Post-Traumatic
Stress, Vietnam, and the Civil War.
2
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War Poetry
which started in the Colonial Wars and is well alive today.5 World War II and the Vietnam War
have also been, and still are, popular poetic topics, as anthologies like W. D. Ehrhart’s Carrying
the Darkness: The Poetry of the Vietnam War and Harvey Shapiro’s Poets of World War II show.6
This chapter analyzes a specific type of war poetry, that of veterans who look back on the wars
they fought. War poems by Yusef Komunyakaa, W. D. Ehrhart, veterans of the Vietnam War, and
Howard Nemerov and Hayden Carruth, World War II veterans, will be discussed in relation to
the images of the “Good War” and the “Bad War” and other master narratives in American
cultural memory of war. The themes and outlooks on war of these veterans will be compared to
the previous discussion on oral history. The four poets have impressive oeuvres that are not
limited to war, yet it is an almost obsessively repeated topic in their work. Rather than
attempting to be an anthology, this chapter will analyze the work of these diverse poets – who
nonetheless express similar messages in their work – in order to paint a more complete picture
of individual and cultural memory of war and to see how, or if, they interact with each other.
Much of the war poetry of these veterans is a critical comment on war, which is what
connects them. Nemerov and Carruth, for instance, have not only written about the Second
World War, but also wrote disapprovingly of the war in Vietnam. W. D. Ehrhart, too, refers to
World War II as well as other U.S. military operations in his work. Like Wilfred Owen, these
poets depict war as horrific. The poems discussed in this chapter were written between 1970
and 2000 – with a few exceptions – but deal with events that happened between 1940 and 1990.
The majority of the poems therefore recall either an old personal memory or a historic event. In
this sense, these poets can be compared to the veterans that are interviewed in books of oral
history, with the notable difference that poets generally personally initiate writing a poem
rather than being asked to share memories.
Apart from being critical of war, the poets are in several ways critical of the United States
in particular. Komunyakaa, for example, writes about the racist behavior he encountered in
5
Lorrie Goldensohn, ed. American War Poetry: An Anthology (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006).
W. D. Ehrhart, ed. Carrying the Darkness: The Poetry of the Vietnam War (Lubbock, TX: Texas Tech University
Press, 1989) and Harvey Shapiro, ed. Poets of World War II (New York: Library of America, 2003).
6
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The Good, The Bad, and The Memory
War Poetry
Vietnam at the tumultuous time of the Civil Rights Movement at home, which connects him to
African Americans interviewed in oral histories. The poetry Nemerov wrote in the 1980s is a
vicious rejection of the “Good War” image of World War II that took shape in American culture
around that time. Having flown for the Canadian RAF and the U.S. Air Force, Nemerov’s
experiences in the Second World War urge him to warn Americans not to forget about the
horrors of war. Ehrhart’s poetry is more personal as he expresses his bitterness, guilt, and
shame over having been part of the Vietnam War. On the other hand, the poet can be intensely
critical of America’s continuing involvement in war as recurrent references to U.S. military
intervention after Vietnam illustrate. Finally, Carruth seems more critical of war in general
rather than of the United States in particular, but his critique of American actions in war is
merely more subtly voiced. However, his downright disgust of war is sometimes even more
palpable than that of the other poets. The work, lives, and experiences of these men tell four
different stories that, together, reveal a universal tale of war and American involvement in it.
SHIPPING IN ANOTHER HERD: THE UNITED STATES AT WAR
While the four poets are all critical of war, they are also critical of the United States, although in
different ways. In this criticism, recurrent references to the victim image discussed in Chapter 1
can be found. Yusef Komunyakaa is particularly outspoken about the cultural and political
racism visible in the country and in the warzone during the Vietnam War. Born James Willie
Brown, Jr. in 1947, Komunyakaa eventually took on the name of his maternal grandfather, who
was smuggled from Trinidad – as family legend would have it.7 During his childhood in Bogalusa,
Louisiana, he was regularly confronted with racism and the Ku Klux Klan and was shocked to see
the segregation between the American troops in Vietnam.8 Serving in 1969 as a reporter for the
newspaper The Southern Cross, Komunyakaa recalls, “there was a whole racial divide in Vietnam
that hasn’t really been talked about that much. It was intense.”9 Only after having established
7
Goldensohn, American War Poetry, 385.
Appy, Patriots, 257.
9
Ibidem, 258.
8
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The Good, The Bad, and The Memory
War Poetry
himself as a major poet did Komunyakaa publish poetry on his war experiences in his 1988 Dien
Cai Dau, Vietnamese slang for American soldiers and literally meaning “crazy.”10 In it, he
describes the realities of combat experience and writes explicitly about the racial divide during
the war, like African American veterans in books of oral history. In many of his poems, music,
and its centrality in black culture, plays an important role.
The first line of the poem “Tu Do Street,” titled after a famous, or infamous, street in
Saigon where Americans could find bars and girls, illustrates the cultural aspects of the
complicated race relations in Vietnam: “Music divides the evening.”11 While this sentence in
itself can have multiple meanings, the poem immediately indicates that the division implied here
is between African Americans and white Americans. With that in mind, the opening line actually
summarizes the segregation of the Vietnam War as depicted by Komunyakaa. While stepping
into a “white bar,” the scene triggers one of the poet’s childhood memories:
[…] I’m a small boy
again in Bogalusa. White Only
signs & Hank Snow. But tonight
I walk into a place where bar girls
fade like tropical birds. When
I order a beer, the mama-san
behind the counter acts as if she
can’t understand, while her eyes
skirt each white face, as Hank Williams
calls from the psychedelic jukebox.12
The poet reveals the racist behavior of the Vietnamese, who appear to reinforce the racial divide.
He suggests that, even halfway across the globe, an African American is still confronted with an
attitude similar to that in the Deep South of the United States during the 1950s. A third party is
presented as a complicating factor: the Vietnamese. The complexity of this “racial triangle” at a
time of war becomes clear in the second half of the poem. First, Komunyakaa points to the
problem of the Vietnamese girls of Tu Do Street:
Back in the bush at Dak To
& Khe Sanh, we fought
10
Subarno Chattarji, Memories of a Lost War: American Poetic Responses to the Vietnam War (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2001), 133.
11
Yusef Komunyakaa, Dien Cai Dau (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1988), 29.
12
Ibidem.
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The Good, The Bad, and The Memory
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the brothers of these women
we now run to hold in our arms.13
One of the most difficult aspects of the Vietnam War that has become essential for
understanding the war is the inability of Americans to tell the difference between Vietnamese
allies and the enemy, the Viet Cong. Komunyakaa describes this element of the war simply but
strikingly by referring to fighting “the brothers of these women,” thereby capturing the general
uncertainty of the war. Moreover, where Komunyakaa earlier wrote, “only machine-gun fire
brings [Americans] together,” at the end of the poem, the longing for the girls on Tu Do Street
accomplishes the same thing and illustrates the paradoxical intimacy created by war:
There’s more than a nation
inside us, as black & white
soldiers touch the same lovers
minutes apart, tasting
each other’s breath,
without knowing these rooms
run into each other like tunnels
leading to the underworld.14
It is likely that these tunnels refer to the web of tunnels the Viet Cong dug during the war to keep
supplies flowing into South Vietnam. In this last sentence, Komunyakaa combines the racial
aspects and the opaqueness of the Vietnam War. By ending the poem with a reference to the
underworld, Komunyakaa creates a scene of utter gloom. The underworld can be a reference to
the enemy tunnels in Vietnam, but it can also refer to the consequences of America’s (immoral
and unnecessary) involvement in Vietnam, and it can mean a personal damnation for the
Americans who fought in the war. In one word, Komunyakaa exposes the multiple tragedies of
the Vietnam War.
Whereas Komunyakaa uses country singers Hank Snow and Hank Williams as a
metaphor for the hostile segregation in the city, Jimi Hendrix symbolizes a sense of togetherness
between, presumably, a group of African American soldiers in “A Break from the Bush.”
The volleyball’s a punching bag:
Clem’s already lost a tooth
& Johnny’s left eye is swollen shut.
13
14
Ibidem.
Ibidem.
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The Good, The Bad, and The Memory
War Poetry
[…]
miles away
machine guns can be heard.
Pretending we’re somewhere else,
we play harder.
Lee Otis, the point man,
high on Buddha grass,
[…]
Frenchie’s cassette player
unravels Hendrix’s “Purple Haze.”15
At first glance, the poem’s title suggests a description of a relaxing break from the war but
Komunyakaa repeatedly hints at the seemingly never-ending, inescapable war and its horrors.
The injuries, the sound of weapons that the music can not overshadow, the ash of a cigarette
“pointing to the floor / like a crooked finger,” and the South China Sea driving in “another herd”
of American soldiers.16 The metaphor of the herd is a reference to the powerlessness, or
victimhood, of American soldiers, similar to the image of the Vietnam veteran discussed in
Chapter 1. The poem further subtly points to the extensive drug use during the war, perhaps also
by mentioning “Purple Haze,” which is well known for its lyrics about drugs. Once again,
Komunyakaa captures essential aspects of the “Bad War” in Vietnam. Finally, as sudden as death
comes in war, Komunyakaa ends the break from the bush:
CJ,
who in three days will trip,
a fragmentation mine,
runs after the ball
[…] laughing.17
It is one of the many instances where Komunyakaa gives his readers insight into the reality of
war and combat.
Apart from drug use and prostitution, another infamous characteristic of the Vietnam
War that is frequently discussed in oral histories is also present in Komunyakaa’s poetry: the
atrocity. “Re-creating the Scene” tells the story of a military trial where three American soldiers
are accused of raping a Vietnamese woman.
15
Ibidem, 27.
Ibidem.
17
Ibidem.
16
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The Good, The Bad, and The Memory
War Poetry
The Confederate flag
flaps from a radio antenna
& the woman’s clothes
come apart in their hands.
[…]
The three men
ride her breath, grunting
over lovers back in Mississippi.
She floats on their rage
like a torn water flower,
defining night inside a machine
where men are gods.18
Komunyakaa describes the woman as a vulnerable natural phenomenon, the water flower,
crushed by the raging machine of Americans waging war. By mentioning the Confederate flag,
Komunyakaa once more reminds the reader of the rampant racism in the war. Yet, the rape can
be seen as an allegory for what the United States did to the country of Vietnam and its people by
becoming involved in the war. The poet’s depiction of a “machine where men are gods” sounds
similar to Admiral Larocque’s critical remarks on American arrogance towards the Japanese, i.e.
Asian, enemy in Chapter 1 and is thus a rejection of America’s perception and execution of
power.
The second half of the poem illustrates the many failures of the American military court.
on the trial’s second day
she turns into mist –
someone says money
changed hands,
& someone else swears
she’s buried at LZ [landing zone] Gator.19
This kind of corruption was not uncommon in the Vietnam War and possibly points to the best
known case of this failed system, the cover up of the My Lai Massacre in 1968 where an
American platoon slaughtered more than 100 Vietnamese women, children, and elderly. Reports
later showed that “at least fifty American officers […] had significant knowledge of the massacre,
either through firsthand observation or eyewitness reports, and all had supported the coverup.”20 After trial, only Lieutenant William Calley was convicted of killing civilians and sentenced
18
Ibidem, 17.
Ibidem.
20
Appy, Patriots, 345.
19
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War Poetry
to life imprisonment. However, he was released after three and a half years under house arrest.21
Komunyakaa never explicitly refers to My Lai, but this poem is nonetheless a critique on
American actions in Vietnam, as are many of his poems.
In fact, the first message Komunyakaa sends out in Dien Cai Dau is that of the
monstrousness of American armed forces, including himself. The fittingly titled poem,
“Camouflaging the Chimera” – a mythical fire-breathing monster –, opens with a jungle ritual:
We tied branches to our helmets.
We painted our faces & rifles.22
So the monster is camouflaged. Komunyakaa often writes about efforts by the American troops
to blend in with the jungle environment. Struggling with nature plays an important role in his
poetry, suggesting that U.S. soldiers were “an alien presence in a hostile landscape.”23 This too
supports the common reading of the Vietnam War as a war with a shadowy enemy and a
menacing landscape.24 On the other hand, Komunyakaa’s description of the Americans’ failure to
blend in with the jungle could be interpreted as a critical comment on the U.S. being there in the
first place. In “Maps Drawn in the Dust,” this becomes more explicit:
[…] We were
no longer young,
no longer innocent:
with the circle now complete,
we were wired to our trigger fingers.25
The loss of innocence is both personal and national, as it is often suggested that the U.S. lost its
innocence after the Second World War.26
In “Re-creating the Scene,” these no longer innocent people assault a powerless
Vietnamese woman, but this is not how Komunyakaa depicts all Vietnamese. In his interview
with Christian Appy, the poet mentions Hanoi Hannah, an English-speaking broadcaster on
Radio Hanoi, and her abuse of the racial tension between the American troops to upset African
21
Ibidem, 346.
Komunyakaa, Dien Cai Dau, 3.
23
Chattarji, Memories of a Lost War, 129.
24
Ibidem.
25
Ibidem, 130.
26
Le Espiritu, “The ‘We-Win-Even-When-We-Lose’ Syndrome,” 335.
22
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War Poetry
American soldiers by playing songs by Ray Charles, B. B. King, or other popular African American
artists.27 It is possible that the memory of the enemy’s use of popular African American music is
the reason for Komunyakaa to signal racial awareness via music in much of his poetry. In the
poem named after Hanoi Hannah, this is no different.
Ray Charles! His voice
calls from waist-high grass,
[…]
“Here’s Hannah again.
[…]
It’s Saturday night in the States,
Guess what your woman’s doing tonight.
I think I’ll let Tina Turner
tell you, you homesick GIs.
[…]
You know you’re dead men,
don’t you? You’re dead
as King today in Memphis.
[…]
Soul Brothers, what are you dying for?”28
It is obvious that Hanoi Hannah’s psychological warfare is aimed at African Americans; her
direct speech leaves no room for an alternative interpretation. Moreover, mentioning the death
of Martin Luther King is a reference to the struggle at home: the Civil Rights Movement. It is a
deliberately agonizing reminder of what the country that asks them to die defending it is still
denying African Americans at home.
The impact of psychological warfare and African Americans’ susceptibility of it is a
recurrent topic in Komunyakaa’s poetry. Possibly unintended, it reinforces the victim image.
“Report from the Skull’s Diorama,” elaborates on psychological warfare and racism:
our chopper glides in closer,
down to the platoon of black GIs
back from night patrol
with five dead.
[…] yellow leaflets quiver
back to the ground, clinging to us.
These men have lost their tongues,
but the red-bordered
27
28
Appy, Patriots, 258.
Komunyakaa, Dien Cai Dau, 13.
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War Poetry
leaflets tell us
VC didn’t kill
Dr. Martin Luther King.29
The yellow, red-bordered leaflets are distributed by the Viet Cong. By linking them to the
platoon of black GIs that has just suffered severe casualties, Komunyakaa illustrates the impact
of this kind of psychological warfare on African Americans. His poetry points to the diverse
tactics the Vietnamese used, ranging from discrimination to intimidation and propaganda.
Nonetheless, references to the Civil Rights Movement were central to the psychological warfare
described in the poetry because it was such a painful reminder of the reality of the struggle
African Americans faced in the United States.
Many of Komunyakaa’s poems suggest that African Americans in Vietnam suffered from
more than just the horrors of war. They were also battling against racism from the Vietnamese
enemy and white Americans, at home and in South-East Asia. This message is similar to what
many African American veterans try to get across in oral histories as well as Wallace Terry’s
remark that “[t]he loyalty of the black Vietnam War veteran stood a greater test on the
battleground than […] any other American soldier in Vietnam.”30 The poems discussed here
seem to reinforce the master narrative of the soldier as a victim, and the African American
soldier in particular. They also reinforce the image of the “Bad War” by describing prostitution,
drug abuse, and atrocities. Komunyakaa is critical of American actions in Vietnam and mentions
the many horrors of combat experience. This too can be interpreted as victimization of the
armed forces by the power of the American army and its political leaders. Although
Komunyakaa’s subtle style creates a nuanced, multifaceted, and complicated image of the
Vietnam War, it generally reinforces the well-known image of the “Bad War.”
In contrast, World War II veteran Howard Nemerov explicitly and vigorously rejects the
image of the “Good War.” Having published poetry since 1947, Nemerov only started writing
regularly about his experiences as a fighter pilot in World War II in the 1980s. Around that time,
he became particularly disturbed by the fact that Americans started to see the Second World
29
30
Ibidem, 47.
Terry, Bloods, xvii, xviii.
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War Poetry
War as the “Good War.” According to Diederik Oostdijk, of all the American poets involved in
World War II, Nemerov “tried to debunk ‘The Good War’ myth most consistently and
assertively.”31 When Nemerov noticed that the master narrative of World War II moved into the
direction of a celebrated, glorified historic episode, he began to warn against “the perennial
temptation of war and how quickly people forget the horror of previous wars.”32 His most
vicious and direct rejection of the image of the “Good War” is found in his 1987 poem “The War
in the Air.”
That was the good war, the war we won
As if there were no death, for goodness’ sake.33
This heartfelt outcry, which comes across as more forceful as Komunyakaa’s tone because
Nemerov resists a narrative rather than to reinforce it, ridicules the popular American reading of
the war through the repetition of the word “good.” The poet reminds his readers that winning a
war should not erase the memory of the suffering. He consciously contradicts the master
narrative and cultural memory by referring to his own memories of the war, albeit indirectly.
After his graduation from Harvard in 1941, Nemerov signed up for the American Air
Force, “attempting to fulfill his childhood dream” of becoming a pilot.34 However, he failed the
demanding training and was not accepted into the Air Force. He enlisted in the Royal Canadian
Air Force and was sent overseas in June 1943. Seven months later, he was transferred to the
American Air Force and completed his tour in April 1945. Nemerov’s Army Separation
Qualification Record and Military Record show that he flew close to four times as many missions
as the average fighter pilot and survived the war without a scratch. Oostdijk summarizes,
[r]egardless of his skills, mental agility, and good luck, the danger he was exposed
to, and the sheer destruction and death that surrounded Nemerov at an early age
haunted him for the rest of his life and it came out through his poetry.35
31
Diederik Oostdijk, “Debunking ‘The Good War’ Myth: Howard Nemerov’s War Poetry,” in Bombs away!:
Representing the Air War over Europe and Japan, eds. Wilfried Wilms and William Rasch, 265-279,
(Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2006), 265.
32
Ibidem, 266.
33
Howard Nemerov, War Stories: Poems about Long Ago and Now (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,
1987), 31.
34
Oostdijk, “Debunking ‘The Good War’ Myth,” 266.
35
Ibidem, 268.
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War Poetry
Herein lies a possible motive for the sudden outburst of anti-“Good War” poetry in the 1980s, at
the end of Nemerov’s career.
In “The War in the Air,” he seems to indicate that the forgetfulness of Americans is
caused by an unawareness of the experiences of the dead.
For saving grace, we didn’t see our dead,
Who rarely bothered coming home to die
But simply stayed away out there
In the clean war, the war in the air.
Seldom the ghosts came back bearing their tales
Of hitting the earth, the incompressible sea.36
It is obvious that he refers to the way people died around him, by hitting the ground or crashing
into the water. This is similar to Komunyakaa’s flash forward of CJ’s death after stepping on a
land mine in “A Break From the Bush,” but, in contrast to the Nemerov’s earlier lines, less direct
in style. The ghosts, as Nemerov calls the fallen pilots, fail to haunt Americans back home
because “they simply stayed out there in the [myth of the] clean war,” but these words might be
an indication that they do haunt the poet. As Oostdijk describes it, “his childhood dream had
become an adulthood nightmare” and Americans were celebrating that nightmare.37 Nemerov is
in this way the perfect example of a war veteran who does not feel connected to, or is even
offended by, the master narrative and tries to tell a different story, his story.
Nemerov was silent about his war experiences, except in his poetry.38 He both reinforces
Tom Brokaw’s observations that veterans of World War II do not want to talk about the war, and
he contradicts it. His reasons for breaking the silence stem from an urge to warn against a
positive reading of that horrendous war. This might explain why the poet explicitly rejects the
popular reading of the war, but why he is reluctant to openly write about his personal traumas.
Not unlike literary historian and World War II veteran, Paul Fussell, Nemerov’s war poetry
seems to say that the image of a good, justified, or necessary war suggests that “it was really not
36
Nemerov, War Stories, 31.
Oostdijk, “Debunking ‘The Good War’ Myth,” 269.
38
Ibidem, 267.
37
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War Poetry
such a bad thing after all. It’s thus necessary to observe that it was a war and nothing else, and
thus stupid and sadistic.”39
In the poem “Authorities,” Nemerov moves away from critique on American culture and
instead voices a discomfort with American politics. Comparable to often-heard complaints of
leadership during the Vietnam War, the first stanza of this poem explicitly doubts the honesty of
government and army officials.
Commanders, and behind them heads of state,
Are said to care for and spend sleepless nights
About the children they commit to war;
You can’t help wondering, though, whether they do.
Or whether, were you safely in their place
Of power […]
You might not say, “Poor bastards, little shits,
They never learned their history in schools
And now they never will […]40
The style of this poem is informal which makes it more straightforward and accessible than
much of Nemerov’s other work. Nonetheless, the poem can, and I believe should, be interpreted
in multiple ways. At first glance, the poor bastards who never got the chance to learn their
history in school are the young soldiers shipped to yet another war – think of Komunyakaa’s
herds. However, Nemerov seems to make the point that commanders and heads of state (the
little shits?) also never learned their history since they repeatedly make the same decisions and
mistakes. The use of the word “children” to describe those who fight wars further stresses the
contrast between their innocence and the power of the authorities and points to the victimhood
of soldiers. Nemerov’s war poetry thus clearly rejects the master narrative of the “Good War”
and refers to the narrative of victimhood by illustrating the horrors of war. In this sense,
Nemerov actually creates an image of a “Bad War” that is not defined by drug abuse or
prostitution but, moving away from connotations of the Vietnam War, instead by general
brutality and a lack of necessity. Unlike Komunyakaa’s “Bad War,” Nemerov’s image does not
39
40
Paul Fussell quoted in Oostdijk, “Debunking ‘The Good War’ Myth,” 275.
Nemerov, War Stories, 7.
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War Poetry
always refer to any war in particular but seems to apply to all wars. His message is therefore
more universally anti-war and more clearly critical of American war policies.
Despite his noble intentions to write poetry to warn against what Subarno Chattarji has
termed America’s “historical and cultural amnesia” of war, Nemerov was fully aware of the
limited impact his words would have.41 He expresses this in the 1973 satirical poem “On Being
Asked for a Peace Poem,” titled after W. B. Yeats’ “On Being Asked for a War Poem,” written in
1915.42 Nemerov’s poem is about a poet, Joe Blow, who sits himself to write about the war in
Vietnam:
This poem, he figures, is
A sacred obligation: all by himself,
Applying the immense leverage of art,
He is about to stop this senseless war.43
Blow imagines winning the Nobel Prize, reading his poem to the General Assembly and the
Security Council, being on TV, and making poetry the “in thing.” He fools himself by thinking that
Homer stopped “that dreadful thing in Troy” and Wordsworth ended the French Revolution; he
overestimates the power of poetry.44
Only trouble was, he didn’t have
A good first line, though he thought that for so great
A theme it would be right to start with O,
Something he would normally have done,
O […]45
Ultimately, Blow never writes beyond “O.” The poem, “the giant instrument / that mediates his
spirit to the world,” does not exist.46 This beautifully witty poem is self-reflective and illustrates
Nemerov’s awareness of the difficulty individuals, at least those not “safely in the place of
power,” have in making a difference. He acknowledges the power and appeal of war in American
culture and accepts the fact that he is unable to alter that.
41
Chattarji, Memories of a Lost War, 63.
Diederik Oostdijk, “‘Aftersight and Foresight:’ The Middle Generation and the War in Vietnam” PN Review
36.4 (March-April 2010): 70.
43
Howard Nemerov, The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1977),
428.
44
Ibidem.
45
Ibidem.
46
Ibidem.
42
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War Poetry
Despite the conviction that his message would “probably not be heard or taken
seriously,” Nemerov nevertheless felt compelled to write his protests.47 For instance in the poem
“On Getting Out of Vietnam,” written around the time of “On Being Asked for a Peace Poem.”
Theseus, if he did destroy the Minotaur
(it’s hard to say, that may have been a myth),
was careful not to close the labyrinth.
So After kept on looking like Before:
Back home in Athens still the elders sent
their quota of kids to Knossos, confident
they would find something to die of, and for.48
A much more traditional poem in both stanzaic form (ABBACCA) and content or metaphor, this
poem illustrates Nemerov’s diversity. By referring to the Greek myth of the labyrinth of King
Minos of Crete, where a man-eating, bull-like creature lived that was fed by Athenians who, as
punishment for killing the King’s son, regularly had to sacrifice boys and girls to the Minotaur,
Nemerov returns to the image of innocent youngsters giving their lives for the mistakes of
elders. Nemerov opens by questioning whether Theseus (the Good) actually did kill the
Minotaur (the Evil). Although the poem was written before the “Good War” myth became
mainstream, it is likely that Nemerov does refer to the Second World War. The sense of being
victorious after World War II was popular long before the rewriting of the master narrative into
the “Good War” and created a black-and-white picture of the Second World War. Nemerov seems
to suggest that it does not matter whether or not Evil was defeated because new, senseless
sacrifices kept being made. Another interpretation is that Nemerov uses Theseus as a metaphor
for the United States as the liberator who supposedly always defeats a malicious enemy. Both
readings are dismissed as myths, as they become the mythical tale of the metaphor.
After the first two lines, Nemerov abandons the actual story of the Minotaur and writes
that Theseus did not close the labyrinth, which led to the Athenians sending more and more kids
to the labyrinth. The rewriting of the Greek myth serves as a reference to the lack of historical
awareness in the United States government and army who continue to get involved in war,
regardless of previous happenings. Athens, in this sense, might be referring to the center of the
47
48
Oostdijk, ‘Aftersight and Foresight,’ 71.
Nemerov, The Collected Poems, 421.
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civilized world – which the United States claims to be in modern times – that lacks the morale to
stop waging war. The elders in this poem continuously send their children to Knossos, a remote,
unknown, and scary place – like Vietnam. The elders seem unwilling to accept that there might
not be any justification for the sacrifice of innocent lives, which is exactly the poet’s message.
Nemerov’s diversely voiced criticism of the U.S. and war seem to revolve around a warning
against ignorance and strongly contradicts the master narrative of World War II but reinforces
the narrative of the Vietnam War as the unnecessary war. Although Nemerov’s other poetry
seems to emphasize the notion that all war is unnecessary.
The main message Nemerov appears to get across in his war poetry is the lack of
knowledge and the universal misunderstanding of previous wars. Nobody learned lessons from
the past, which resulted in new wars and new horrors. This message is strikingly similar to the
message in many of W. D. Ehrhart’s war poems and especially in his 1990 poem “Song for Leela,
Bobby and Me,” dedicated to Robert Ross who was killed in Vietnam.
Since you’ve been gone, they’ve taken boys
like you and me and killed them in Grenada,
Lebanon, the Persian Gulf, and Panama.
And yet I’m told I’m living in the past.
Maybe that’s the trouble: we’re a nation
with no sense of history, no sense at all.49
In a prose-like style, Ehrhart expresses his anger over American history lessons never learnt.
Like Nemerov’s “children,” Ehrhart’s soldiers are “boys,” with connotations of innocence and
naivety. Ehrhart blames the American government or the army – it is never clear to whom he
refers by “they” – for “killing” Americans, accusing them of murder. This is in line with his
accusation that his nation – from which he nevertheless does not distance himself – has no sense
of history, or even no sense at all.
Ehrhart volunteered for the Marine Corps in 1966, when he was seventeen. He arrived in
Vietnam in early February 1967 and left in late February 1968.50 While he volunteered and
initially was enthusiastic about going to Vietnam, his views changed unrecognizably during and
49
W. D. Ehrhart, Beautiful Wreckage. New and Selected Poems (Easthampton, MA: Adastra Press, 1999), 153.
W. D. Ehrhart, Ordinary Lives. Platoon 1005 and the Vietnam War (Philadelphia: Temple University Press,
1999), 20.
50
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after the war. In the winter of 1966, Ehrhart confesses, he had written in a journalism class,
“What more noble a cause can a man die for than to die in defense of freedom?”51 A remark that
is completely in line with the American cultural identity of having a mission to rid the world of
oppression. After the war, he became an active member of Vietnam Veterans Against the War
(VVAW) and critique on the war became a prominent theme in his poetry and other work.
However, like Nemerov, Ehrhart eventually realized “the fate of the world doesn’t hinge on me
successfully persuading everyone else to see things my way.”52 Nonetheless, much of his poetry
voices his anger about American culture and war politics.
In his 1981 poem “A Warning to My Students,” the American need for war, especially in
the context of the Cold War, becomes apparent.
The B-1 bomber
is going to be built
after all […]
“Necessity requires…,”
yet another president insists;
the secretary of state discusses
limited nuclear war
as if it were sane;
and in El Salvador, another
petty upper-class junta
needs American aid
to fight the communists.
[…]
And now I see it all
coming
one more time; one
by one, all the old flags
resurrected […]
The next time they come looking
for soldiers, they’ll come looking
for you.53
Ehrhart points to the self-perceived necessity of war in the United States. Like the elders of
Athens in Nemerov’s “On Getting Out of Vietnam,” American leaders convince themselves that
yet another bomb is needed to scare away yet another enemy or to help yet another country or
51
Ibidem.
Ibidem, 21.
53
Ehrhart, Beautiful Wreckage, 85, 86.
52
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an ideologically favorable group of people. While the messages of both poets are similar,
Ehrhart’s prose-like style, mainly devoid of metaphors or symbolism, sets him apart from
Nemerov and Komunyakaa as well. This makes Ehrhart’s poetry accessible to a larger audience,
and possibly to his students to whom the warning is directed, and gets his message across more
directly. Ehrhart’s recognizable examples leave no room for an alternative interpretation. His
description of a “petty upper-class junta” is therefore undoubtedly a reminder that the classic
ideal of Americans liberating the repressed and bringing freedom is no longer the reality. He
clearly illustrates that the cultural ideology of good versus evil in which he strongly believed
before he went to Vietnam is a myth.
Like many World War II poets, including Nemerov, Ehrhart seems troubled by the
aftersight of the war he fought and the foresight of new wars to come.54 By asking “What
happened / to the last twenty years?” now that old flags are resurrected, Ehrhart implies that
the United States has learned no lessons.55 A similar tone is found in “Letter,” a poem written for
“a North Vietnamese soldier / whose life crossed paths with mine / in Hue City, February 5 th,
1968.”56
What’s it like back there?
It’s all behind us here,
[…] things are back to normal.
We just had a special birthday,
and we’ve found again our inspiration
by recalling where we came from
and forgetting where we’ve been.57
The special birthday is the U.S. Bicentennial of July 4, 1976. Ehrhart explicitly refers to the
cherry picking involved in creating a common identity and history, of which forgetting is an
essential element. Ehrhart is critical of the American tendency to look back to the Founding
Fathers and the Constitution, claiming that the country has not changed in over two hundred
54
Oostdijk, ‘Aftersight and Foresight,’ 71.
Ehrhart, Beautiful Wreckage, 85.
56
Ibidem, 29.
57
Ibidem.
55
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years. This stanza should be interpreted as a rejection of a strand of American nationalism that
“continuously looks backward, to a vanished and idealized national past.”58
Written only a year after the Fall of Saigon, the poem suggests that everything is back to
normal in the U.S., but the fierce public debates on the War in the 1980s illustrate otherwise.
This sentence can therefore refer to the lack of material damage in the United States after the
war, which creates the illusion that nothing happened and presents ample opportunities for
Americans to forget about the war. That this is harder for the Vietnamese is made apparent in
the latter half of the poem when Ehrhart tells the North Vietnamese soldier to
[…] build houses; build villages,
dikes and schools, songs
and children in that green land
I blackened with my shadow
and the shadow of my flag.59
The poet expresses guilt over having been involved in the war that cast a black shadow over
Vietnam and he urges the Vietnamese to “please / do no let it come down / to nothing.”60 These
feelings of guilt are also inevitably a critique on the U.S. fighting war and can be compared to
Komunyakaa’s depiction of the U.S. as a chimera. Despite his rejection of the American way of
dealing with the burden of the “Bad War” by looking for a justification or even a necessity,
Ehrhart actually does something similar. However, instead of finding a justification for the war
in his own country, as many Americans tried to do, he seems to ask his former enemy to turn the
dreadful experience into something meaningful. He urges the North Vietnamese soldier to
“remember where you’ve been, and why,” in order to prevent history from repeating itself, as it
will eventually do in the U.S.61
Like “Letter,” other poems Ehrhart wrote shortly after the war ended were filled with
anger and were a cry for recognition that Vietnam veterans generally felt they did not receive.
The 1975 poem “A Relative Thing” addresses “America” and speaks for these veterans:
58
Lieven, America Right or Wrong, 7.
Ibidem, 30.
60
Ibidem.
61
Ibidem.
59
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We are the ones you sent to fight a war
you didn’t know a thing about.
It didn’t take us long to realize
the only land that we controlled
was covered by the bottoms of our boots.
[…]
We are the ones who have to live
with the memory that we were the instruments
of your pigeon-breasted fantasies.
[…]
those of us that lived
have tried to tell you what went wrong.
Now you think you do not have to listen.
[…]
We are your sons, America,
And you cannot change that.62
Here, the dichotomy is not so much between soldiers and the establishment, as in Nemerov’s
“Authorities,” but between soldiers and the home front. It expresses the frustration many
Vietnam veterans felt over having to fight an obviously unwinnable war, over living with the
memories of that war, the disillusionment of not being heard, and the anger over the way society
treated them after they came home, sentiments found in oral histories as well. It also reinforces
the image of the powerless GI that is a victim of America’s “pigeon-breasted fantasies.” The poet
also indirectly illustrates the irony of an entire generations’ loss of innocence while the
generation that sent them or war “clings to a pre-war type of innocence.”63
While such feelings of resentment, shame, and guilt may sound familiar because they are
similar to the common image of the Vietnam veteran in popular culture, Ehrhart’s search for the
men of Platoon 1005, his platoon during the training for the Marine Corps, in the book Ordinary
Lives illustrates that many veterans do not experience the same frustrations. None of the eighty
men Ehrhart interviewed for the book share his perspective on the war but instead think
we would have won if only the politicians wouldn’t have interfered, or if only we
had invaded North Vietnam, or if only any of the other myriad ideas and beliefs
Americans hold about the war.64
62
Ibidem, 9, 10.
Chattarji, Memories of a Lost War, 148.
64
Ehrhart, Ordinary Lives, 21.
63
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These diverse interpretations illustrate that the common image of the bitter, anti-war Vietnam
veteran, familiar from, for instance, the paralyzed veteran Ron Kovic in the Oliver Stone’s film
Born on the Fourth of July, based on Kovic’s memoirs, is in fact only one of many narratives of the
Vietnam veteran – as the survey discussed in Chapter 1 also shows. However, Ehrhart despises
Kovic’s memoirs and accuses him of “disingenuousness” for obscuring facts “to make himself
appear to be the naive kid suddenly struck down in his innocence instead of an experienced
veteran who knew what he and his country were doing.”65 This example is therefore a reference
to the popularity of the Born on the Fourth of July image in American culture and should not be
connected to Ehrhart. At the same time, it does illustrate a contested narrative and gives insight
into the problematic myth-like quality of the “Bad War,” which tends to stress one particular
reading of the war.
In Ordinary Lives, Ehrhart finally accepts the fact that not everybody has the same views
on the war as he does and admits to have stopped trying to convince them of his point of view.
This reminds of Nemerov’s self-reflection in “On Being Asked for a Peace Poem.” World War II
veteran and established poet, Hayden Carruth, wrote a poem in the 1980s in which he expresses
a similar realization that his words have not changed the world. The entire poem is a bitter
response to its title, “On Being Asked to Write a Poem Against the War in Vietnam:”
Well I have and in fact
more than one and I’ll
tell you this too
I wrote one against
Algeria that nightmare
and another against
Korea and another
against the one
I was in
[…]
and not one
breath was restored
to one
shattered throat
mans womans or childs
65
W. D. Ehrhart, The Madness of it All: Essays on War, Literature and American Life (Jefferson, NC: McFarland &
Company, 2002), 211.
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not one not
one
but death went on and on […]66
Carruth appears to have so little confidence in the power of his poem that he does not even
bother to use punctuation. The breaks of the lines and stanzas also make little or no sense and
turn the poem into a chaotic whole. The message is obviously more important than the style;
although the poem’s clumsy style reinforces the sense that poetry, or perhaps language, is a
powerless medium. Nothing can be done to undo the deaths of war. Despite the remarkable
similar message and title, Carruth’s poem strikes a different note in comparison to Nemerov’s
“On Being Asked for a Peace Poem.” Whereas Nemerov is witty, Carruth only expresses
disappointment and powerlessness. His poem lacks an amusing storyline, which makes it less
appealing but much more direct.
In contrast to what its title might suggest, “On Being Asked to Write a Poem Against the
War in Vietnam” is actually a general anti-war poem. Carruth has also written more explicitly
about Vietnam; his 1973 “The Birds of Vietnam,” deals with the familiar image of the “Bad War.”
Speaking to and of the endangered birds in Vietnam – likely a metaphor for the people of
Vietnam – the World War II veteran mentions the birds of America.
I have seen the road runner and the golden eagle,
the great white heron and the Kirtland’s warbler,
our own endangered species,
and I have worried about them.
[…]
the ones we have harried, murdered, driven away
as if we were the Appointed Avengers,
the Destroyers, the Wrathful Ones
out of our ancestors’ offended hearts
at the cruel beginnings of the world.
But for what? Form whom? Why?
Nobody knows […]67
Here, too, like in Ehrhart’s “Letter,” the poet’s expression of guilt over the destruction of Vietnam
is at the same time a critical comment on American actions. Carruth’s criticism of the United
66
Hayden Carruth, Collected Shorter Poems: 1946-1991 (Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 1992), 203,
204.
67
Ibidem, 94.
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War Poetry
States, although different in style, is also similar to Nemerov’s and Ehrhart’s: there is no
justification for Americans acting as avengers, destroyers or wrathful ones. The poem points to
the self-destructiveness of the U.S. that drives away even their own birds, their own nature, and
perhaps their own history. Like many veterans interviewed in Studs Terkel’s “The Good War,”
Christian Appy’s Patriots, and Ehrhart, Carruth desperately seeks a meaning for the war. On the
other hand, the harsh criticism in this and other poems discussed in this chapter is in sharp
contrast to the veterans in oral histories who only sporadically express such sentiments. The
obvious and recurrent rejection of the popular idea that America has a special mission in the
world is primarily found in war poetry.
The poetry of these four veterans clearly reinforces the narrative of the American GI as a
victim. Whether they are boys or children, birds or “herds,” American soldiers are powerless
against the plans of their country. These poems are therefore not only critical of war but also of
the United States and clearly reject the idea that the U.S. has a missionary goal to fulfill in the
world. The poets also describe a sense of personal powerlessness because their words do not
change the world. They criticize themselves. While World War II veteran Nemerov forcefully
debunks the master narrative of the “Good War,” he instead reinforces the master narrative of a
“Bad War,” sometimes related to Vietnam but in other instances representative of war in
general. Ehrhart, Carruth, and Komunyakaa also reinforce this image, although Komunyakaa
rarely explicitly refers to wars other than the Vietnam War. The message that all war is bad and
unnecessary diminishes the common distinction between the Vietnam War and World War II –
and other wars, for that matter. Yet, the master narrative of the Vietnam War allows these poets
to connect their message to that one particularly bad and unnecessary war, illustrating a
possible influence of the master narrative of the “Bad War” on war poetry. Nonetheless, the
criticism of these diverse poets on American culture and politics has become something of a
narrative in itself.
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ON DEATH, GUILT, AND POLITICS: MEMORY IN WAR POETRY
Now that we have established that the poets, despite their differences, are all critical of war, be it
their own wars or others, it is easier to define a narrative of war poetry as written by these
outspoken poets. The political narrative of the ongoing cycle of mostly needless wars in the
world, but in the United States in particular, has been established above. This section will deal
more directly with memory. However, as will become clear, the poetry by these veterans rarely
completely distinguishes between the personal and political. Moreover, given the nature of
poetry, it is challenging to determine where the memory ends and the art starts. And finally, the
problems with memory discussed in the previous chapter obviously apply to war poetry as well.
Nonetheless, the recurrent and often overlapping themes death and guilt, or survivor guilt,
present a narrative of memory in war poetry, which sets the genre somewhat apart from oral
history.
Death is a common theme in war poetry. It was recurrent in World War I poetry and it is
often used in poetry of the Second World War and the Vietnam War. The veterans speak of death
in general, death of people they have known, or, in the cases of Komunyakaa and Ehrhart, of
killing. Because of the many references to death in the poetry, only a small selection of poems
with references to death will be discussed here. Obviously, death and guilt are related themes. In
many poems, therefore, we can find both subjects. One of such poems is Carruth’s “Adolf
Eichmann.”
Hayden Carruth is mostly known for his Vietnam poetry and this is why his war poems
contain few personal memories of the war. His powerful 1962 “Adolf Eichmann” is an exception:
[…] Sometimes in my bed
I study my feet, noticing their disgrace,
For the human foot is an ugly thing. But my bed
Is nothing like the bed that I have seen
Where hundreds of unclothed bodies lay. That bed
Was for dead people, deeply dug, and whoever has seen
Their feet knows the real ugliness and in their voice
Has heard the only true language. I have seen
And I have heard, but my feet live and my voice
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The Good, The Bad, and The Memory
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Is beautiful and strong […]68
The poem, which does not rhyme but simply repeats every last word of a line three times, speaks
of death and survivor guilt. The memories of mass graves haunt the poet in his bed, suggesting
he still has nightmares on war and death. Moreover, the last few lines can be interpreted as an
expression of guilt over having survived the war. He has seen and heard real ugliness and the
truth of death, yet he is alive and strong.
Carruth now uses his beautiful and strong voice to curse Adolf Eichmann in the second
part of the poem:
[…] and I say let the dung
Be heaped on that man until it chokes his voice,
Let him be made leprous so that the dung
May snuggle to his bone, let his eyes be shut
With slow blinding, let him be fed his own dung,
But let his ears never, never be shut,
And let young voices read to him, name by name,
From the rolls of all those people whom he has shut
Into the horrible beds, and let his name
Forever and ever be the word for hate,
Eichmann, cast out of the race, a loathsome name
For another kind, a sport spawned in hate
That can never be joined, never, in the world of man.
Lord, forgive me, I cannot keep down my hate.69
More than disgust of war, this part of the poem expresses disgust of this one man. The poem
ends with another manifestation of guilt, this time over having articulated the hatred for
Eichmann. The poem was written around the time of Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem; Carruth thus
shares not only his traumatic, personal memories but also refers to political developments. It
appears that Carruth, while writing this poem, does believe his strong poetic voice can make a
difference. As we have seen, however, later in life his views on the power of poetry changed.
The hatred spewed by Carruth differs greatly from Nemerov’s response to that other
Adolf: “Hate Hitler? No, I spared him hardly a thought,” he writes in a 1987 poem.70 Instead, in
68
Ibidem, 34.
Ibidem.
70
Goldensohn, American War Poetry, 220.
69
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his attempts to debunk the “Good War” myth, Nemerov elaborates on the hateful behavior of the
supposed good guys:
But Corporal Irmin […]
Wing Commander Briggs,
And the station CO. Group Captain Ormery –
Now there were men were objects fit to hate
[…]
With Power in their pleasure, smile or frown.
Not to forget my navigator Bert,
Who shyly explained to me that the Jews
Were ruining England and Hitler might be wrong
But he had the right idea…We were a crew,
[…]
All the above were friends. And then the foe.71
Fittingly titled “IFF,” after a devise used by the Air Force to identity friend or foe, this poem
containing Nemerov’s memories of the war complicate the dichotomy between the undoubtedly
good versus the unquestionably evil. In contrast to Carruth’s tale of the “Bad Man,” Nemerov
once more returns to the image of the general badness of the “Good War.”
While these World War II poets write implicitly or explicitly about death in general, the
Vietnam veterans also speak of killing. Both Ehrhart and Komunyakaa describe how they took
another life while fighting the war. It is remarkable that veterans only write about their kills
within the master narrative of the war in Vietnam and this suggests an influence of cultural
memory or the image of the “baby killer.” In “Guns,” W. D. Ehrhart asks himself when and how he
can tell his daughter that he killed someone during the war.
How do you tell a four-year-old
what steel can do to flesh?
How vivid do you dare to get?
[…]
Just eighteen, I killed
A ten-year-old. I didn’t know.
He spins across the marketplace
all shattered chest, all eyes and arms.
Do I tell her that? Not yet […].72
In the 1999 poem “Beautiful Wreckage,” he reflects on other memories of death:
71
72
Ibidem, 220, 221.
Ehrhart, Beautiful Wreckage, 173.
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The Good, The Bad, and The Memory
War Poetry
What if I didn’t shoot the old lady
running away from our patrol,
or the old man in the back of the head,
or the boy in the marketplace?73
Both poems deal with the deaths of the presumed innocent – the child, the woman, the elderly –
and clearly reinforce the “Bad War” narrative and the image of the American soldier as a “baby
killer,” especially because Ehrhart’s victims are running away or shot in the back. By writing
about these memories, the poet expresses guilt and shame over having fought a dirty war, even
decades after it ended. At the same time, he addresses questions surrounding memory and truth:
What if none of it happened the way I said?
Would it all be a lie?
Would the wreckage be suddenly beautiful?
Would the dead rise up and walk?74
He seems to suggest that even if individuals would tell stories, rather than recite factual events,
the reality and horror of war is not altered. He expresses a feeling of powerlessness similar to
that of Carruth in “On Being Asked to Write a Poem Against the War in Vietnam.” In “Beautiful
Wreckage,” Ehrhart is thus both personal as well as political.
Ehrhart’s straightforward style differs greatly from Komunyakaa’s lyrical description of
shooting a Vietnamese man in “We Never Know.”
He danced with the tall grass
for a moment, as if he was swaying
with a woman. Our gun barrels
glowed white-hot.
When I got to him
a blue halo
of flies had already claimed him.
[…]
I slid the wallet into his pocket
& turned him over, so he wouldn’t be
kissing the ground.75
The romantic opening of the poem is juxtaposed with the cruel reality of death in war.
Komunyakaa does not indicate whether he shot the man personally but does describe how he
turned the corps over to leave him in a more dignified position, confessing his involvement in
73
Ibidem, 206
Ibidem.
75
Komunyakaa, Dien Cai Dau, 26.
74
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The Good, The Bad, and The Memory
War Poetry
the event. The final line returns to the romantic image of the beginning and Komunyakaa seems
to compare the killing to the intimacy of a romance, which somewhat blurs the lines between
good and bad. This poem expresses guilt less explicitly in comparison to Ehrhart’s poems, mainly
because Komunyakaa never refers to the victim’s innocence or an unnecessary kill. Where
Ehrhart’s multiple references to the boy shot in the marketplace are illustrative of his struggle
with the memory, Komunyakaa’s lyrical tale lacks such personal and intimate elements. At the
same time, the way the body is taken care of in Komunyakaa’s poem might be an indication of
the poet’s attempt to make up for something after having acted in the most inhumane way.
Nevertheless, instead of condemning them, Komunyakaa depicts his actions as decent.
This is not the case in “You and I Are Disappearing.” The tragic poem recalls the poet’s
traumatic memory of a young Vietnamese burn victim.
The cry I bring down from the hills
belongs to a girl still burning
inside my head.
[…]
A skirt of flames
dances around her
at dusk.
We stand with our hands
hanging at our sides,
while she burns
like a sack of dry rice.76
Here, Komunyakaa depicts himself as a powerless, passive anti-hero, compatible with the image
of the “baby killer.” It is unclear to whom “we” refers, but it is likely these are other men in the
platoon. Another explanation is that it is a metaphor for everybody who continues to let war
happen. Given the subject of the poem, it is possible that the poet refers to Nick Ut’s famous
photograph of Kim Phuc, the naked napalmed girl running from her burning village, which
“affected the worldwide reading of what the Vietnam War was all about.”77 However, this is
never explicit. The poem’s title suggests that the guilt over his inaction made Komunyakaa lose a
part of himself; he disappeared together with the girl. Yet the memory of it all never faded. The
76
Ibidem, 17.
Rob Kroes, Photographic Memories. Private Pictures, Public Images, and American History (Hanover, NH:
Dartmouth College Press, 2007), 73.
77
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The Good, The Bad, and The Memory
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first line of the poem describes the poet crying or screaming over the disturbing experience and
in the last lines, Komunyakaa remembers the smell:
She rises like dragonsmoke
To my nostrils.
She burns like a burning bush
Driven by a godawful wind.78
The final lines – with spelling errors similar to Carruth’s lack of punctuation in “On Being Asked
to Write a Poem Against the War in Vietnam” – suggest that the continuation of the burn is
caused by a “godawful wind,” by which Komunyakaa could refer to himself and the men in his
platoon who let the girl burn, if we use that interpretation. The wind can also be an allegory for
the U.S. or for war in general. Following this second interpretation, Komunyakaa, like the other
poets, does not separate his personal memories from the politics of war.
Although the poets have diverse experiences to feel guilty about, they all repeatedly use
a common metaphor for guilt and a troubled conscience: dirt, or the inability to wash oneself
clean. Komunyakaa describes how the dirt of the war never leaves him: “I blow the dust off my
hands / but it flies back in my face.”79 The memories and experiences of the war literally cling to
his body. Ehrhart struggles with a similar problem. In “What I Know About Myself,” he recalls a
friend who
reached for a book of photographs
from Vietnam. […]
“Look how young
you are. How innocent. How evil.”
She knew I knew what she meant,
and she was right.
“Our hands will never be clean,”
she said, “but we must try.”
And so I do, washing my hands
again and again of the filth
I’ve touched and never want
to touch my wife.
I want clean hands […]80
78
Ibidem.
Komunyakaa, Dien Cai Dau, 58.
80
Ehrhart, Beautiful Wreckage, 196, 197.
79
85
The Good, The Bad, and The Memory
War Poetry
The poet is unable to cleanse himself from the filth of his past. Yet, he acknowledges his
innocence in the poem, albeit juxtaposed with his evilness. These lines therefore points to the
victim image while the rest of the poem emphasizes the poet’s evilness and the impossibility to
change that.
Finally, Howard Nemerov, too, tries to wash himself clean. His 1950 “Redeployment,”
ends with the following failed attempt:
The end of the war. I took it quietly
Enough. I tried to wash the dirt out of
My hair and from under my fingernails,
I dressed in clean white clothes and went to bed.
I heard the dust falling between the walls.81
The white, clean clothes refer to innocence but, like Komunyakaa and Ehrhart, Nemerov cannot
regain his innocence because he is unable to ignore the war: even if the dust is not on his body, it
is in his environment. This inability to escape from the war is aptly expressed in the first line of
the poem: “They say the war is over.”82 Nemerov reveals that, for him, the war is never over. In a
remarkably similar tone, style, and symbolism, the other poets share that feeling. Apart from
these explicit references, the mere body of war poetry by these veterans illustrates that their
wars are not over. The wars they fought live on in their memories and Americans continue to
wage war. Once more, the personal and political are intertwined in war poetry.
CONCLUSION
Much more obvious than veterans recalling memories in books of oral history, those who write
poetry tend to link their memories to politics. It is therefore harder to distinguish between
actual memories and stories that serve the purpose of getting a message across. In the case of
the veterans of World War II and the Vietnam War discussed in this chapter, that message
revolves around critique on war in general and the unneeded continuation of American wars in
particular. Much of the poetry is therefore also a critique on American culture and politics. The
constant reinforcement of the almost universal horrors of war diminishes the differences
81
82
Goldensohn, American War Poetry, 222.
Ibidem, 221.
86
The Good, The Bad, and The Memory
War Poetry
between the Second World War and the war in Vietnam but at the same time reinforces the
narrative of a “Bad War,” which is ultimately linked to the Vietnam War. It is possible that both
Hayden Carruth and Howard Nemerov therefore use the Vietnam War to make their points.
Whereas many interviewed veterans agree with the cultural image of World War II as
the “Good War,” the poets completely reject that. They reveal Castells’ “resistance identity” in a
narrative that repeatedly opposes the dominant cultural and political narrative.83 This indicates
that they are more autonomous and tend to create a separate narrative of needless, ongoing
wars, rather than reinforce the master narratives of American cultural memory. On the other
hand, the master narrative of the “Bad War” allows these poets to be critical of the United States
and here we can see and influence of the master narrative and cultural memory.
The fact that poets are aware of the limited influence their message will have on public
opinion illustrates the lack of interaction between the individual memory of veterans that write
poetry and the cultural memory of the United States. Despite their outspoken critique, or
perhaps because of it, veterans are unlikely to modify the master narratives of World War II and
the Vietnam War, or the appeal of war in American society, through war poetry.
83
Castells, The Power of Identity, 8.
87