[On Feb. 2, 2004, Roslindale Neighbors for Peace and Justice (Roslindale, MA) held a community poetry reading, The Sorrow of War/The Power of Poetry, featuring two antiwar Vietnam veterans: David Connelly and Kevin Bowen. John Hess delivered the following introductory remarks.]
[It should be noted that these remarks are designed to center on the words of the combatants themselves, which is why I have quoted so extensively.]
George Orwell, and no one understood propaganda better than Orwell, once said that in our times no war would — ostensibly — be fought for crass and vulgar reasons. All wars would — ostensibly — be fought for the highest ideals, for the grandest causes. We are all familiar, too familiar, with such rhetoric: “The war to end all wars,” “A war to make the world safe for democracy,” war to “rid the world of the infidel,” war to “make the world safe for civilization.” Behind the grand rhetoric, the big abstractions lies the simple, concrete fact: wars are fought by people, by individual men and women, and it is individual men and women who suffer from them. We are here tonight to hear how two Vietnam combat veterans experienced war, suffered from that experience, and have learned to deal/heal through their poetry.
The stories of the warriors and the victims, those who have experienced war first hand, are where those of us who have never been to or in war learn best of war. One of the finest memoirs of the Vietnam War is Philip Caputo’s A Rumor of War. In its way, this story of a young American Marine officer who fought in Vietnam from 1965-6 is a paradigm of both war in general and of our nation’s experience in that particular war. Let me speak of a few salient elements of that paradigm.
Young men and now women go to war for a variety of reasons, personal and political. But it is the cause that tends to make the decision to go to war seem a noble one, that wraps the individual in the flag, the melds the individual with the national interest. We have probably all read Rupert Brooke’s idealistic lines written as he volunteered to fight against the Germans in 1914:
If I should die, think only this of me,
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is forever England.
(“The Soldier”)
Caputo describes his idealism as he first entered Vietnam.
- War is always attractive to young men who know nothing about it, but we had also been seduced into uniform by Kennedy’s challenge to “ask what you can do for your country” and by the missionary idealism he had awakened in us. America seemed omnipotent then: the country could still claim it had never lost a war, and we believed we were ordained to play cop to the Communists’ robber and spread our own political faith around the world. Like the French soldiers of the late eighteenth century, we saw ourselves as the champions of “a cause that was destined to triumph.” So, when we marched into the rice paddies on that damp March afternoon, we carried, along with our packs and rifles, the implicit convictions that the Viet Cong would be quickly beaten and that we were doing something altogether noble and good. We kept the packs and rifles; the convictions, we lost. (xiv)
Caputo speaks, and we will briefly return to this later, of how the experience of war profoundly, as we of course expect, changed him.
- Beyond adding a few more corpses to the weekly body count, none of these encounters [with the Viet Cong] achieved anything; none will ever appear in military histories or be studied by cadets at West Point. Still, they changed us and taught us, the men who fought in them; in those obscure skirmishes we learned the old lessons about fear, cowardice, courage, suffering, cruelty, and comradeship. Most of all, we learned about death at an age when it is common to think of oneself as immortal. Everyone loses that illusion eventually, but in civilian life it is lost in installments over the years. We lost it all at once and, in the span of months, passed from boyhood through manhood to a premature middle age. The knowledge of death, of the implacable limits placed on a man’s existence, severed us from our youth as irrevocably as a surgeon’s scissors had once severed us from the womb. And yet few of us were past twenty-five. We left Vietnam peculiar creatures, with young shoulders that bore rather old heads. (xv)
Yet there is an attraction to war that remains, for a variety of reasons, as we will briefly see. In Caputo’s phrase, “within a year I began growing nostalgic for the war” (xvi). Why?
- The war was still being fought, but this desire to go back did not spring from any patriotic ideas about duty, honor, and sacrifice, the myths with which old men send young men off to get killed or maimed. It arose, rather, from a recognition of how deeply we had been changed, how different we were from everyone who had not shared with us the miseries of the monsoon, the exhausting patrols, the fear of a combat assault on a hot landing zone. We had very little in common with them. Though we were civilians again, the civilian world seemed alien. We did not belong to it as much as we did to that other world, where we had fought and our friends had died. (xvi)
- Because I had fought in it [the war], it was not an abstract issue, but a deeply emotional experience, the most significant thing that had happened to me. It held my thoughts, senses, and feelings in an unbreakable embrace. I would hear in thunder the roar of artillery. I could not listen to rain without recalling those drenched nights on the line, nor walk through woods without instinctively searching for a trip wire or an ambush. I could protest as loudly as the most convinced activist, but I could not deny the grip the war had on me, nor the fact that it had been an experience as fascinating as it was repulsive, as exhilarating as it was sad, as tender as it was cruel. (xvi)
- I, too, saw God through mud —
- The mud that cracked on cheeks when wretches smiled.
- War brought more glory to their eyes than blood,
- And it gave their laughs more glee than shakes a child.
- Merry it was to laugh there —
- Where death becomes absurd and life absurder.
- For power was on us as we slashed bones bare
- Not to feel sickness or remorse of murder.
- I, too, have dropped off fear —
- Behind the barrage, dead as my platoon,
- And sailed my spirit surging light and clear
- Past the entanglement where hopes lay strewn;
- And witnessed exultation —
- Faces that used to curse me, scowl for scowl,
- Shine and lift up with passion of oblation,
- Seraphic for an hour; though they were foul.
- I have made fellowships —
- Untold of happy lovers in old song.
- For love is not the binding of fair lips
- With the soft silk of eyes that look and long,
- By Joy, whose ribbon slips, —
- But wound with war’s hard wire whose stakes are strong;
- Bound with the bandage of the arm that drips;
- Knit in the webbing of the rifle thong.
- I have perceived much beauty
- In the hoarse oaths that kept our courage straight;
- Heard music in the silentness of duty;
- Found peace where the shell-storms spouted reddest spate.
- Nevertheless, except you share
- With them in hell the sorrowful dark of hell,
- Whose world is but the trembling of a flare,
- And heaven but as the highway for a shell,
- You shall not hear their mirth:
- You shall not come to think them well content
- By any jest of mine. These men are worth
- Your tears. You are not worth their merriment.
- (“Apologia Pro Poemate Meo” [“Apology for My Poem”] 1917)
- The mud that cracked on cheeks when wretches smiled.
- It is, unlike marriage, a bond that cannot be broken by a word, by boredom or divorce, or by anything other than death. Sometimes even that is not strong enough. Two friends of mine died trying to save the corpses of their men from the battlefield. Such devotion, simple and selfless, the sentiment of belonging to each other, was the one decent thing we found in a conflict otherwise notable for its monstrosities. (xvii)
- The sorrow of war inside a soldier’s heart was in a strange way similar to the sorrow of love. It was a kind of nostalgia, like the immense sadness of a world at dusk. It was a sadness, a missing, a pain which could send one soaring back into the past. The sorrow of the battlefield could not normally be pinpointed to one particular event, or even one person. If you focused on any one event it would soon become a tearing pain. (94)
“There is a force at work in him that he cannot resist, as though it opposes every orthodox attitude taught him and it is now his task to expose the realities of war and to tear aside conventional images” (50). And, after these conventional images are torn away, “what remained was sorrow, the immense sorrow, the sorrow of having survived. The sorrow of war” (192).
The other half of the title is The Power of Poetry, for from earliest times poetry has been poetry about war. At times poetry has been used to glorify war. “Arms and the man I sing,” said Virgil. But poetry has also been used to caution, to describe the horrors as well as the glories of war, perhaps to subtly convey an anti-war message, as in the earliest European poem, The Iliad.
War is perhaps the most awful, the most horrifying of human experiences, for there savagery occurs on a mass not an individual level, and thus calls into question our understanding of what it means when we say “humanity.” War strips away illusions, lays bare hard realities. Those who have fought in wars again and again tell of the great shock war causes them, the great challenge war makes to all sense of value and civilization. In the words of Eugene Sledge, in his WWII memoir, With The Old Breed, speaking about the battle for Okinawa:
- If a Marine slipped and slid down the back slope of the muddy ridge, he was apt to reach the bottom vomiting. I saw more than one man lose his footing and slip and slide all the way to the bottom only to stand up horror-stricken as he watched in disbelief while fat maggots tumbled out of his muddy dungaree pockets, cartridge belt, leggings laces, and the like….
- We didn’t talk about such things. They were too horrible and obscene even for hardened veterans….It is too preposterous to think that men could actually live and fight for days and nights on end
under such terrible conditions and not be driven insane….To me the war was insanity. (260)
By speaking of war honestly and thoughtfully. One way of speaking, perhaps the best way, is through poetry. Through the power of poetry, we learn to see war. By heightening the experience of war through the power of poetry, we learn to comprehend it (even if vicariously) and to sympathize. Through the power of poetry, the war experience is rendered, so to speak, transcendent, meaningful. And, through the power of poetry, we can begin to heal.
Paul Fussell, in The Great War and Modern Memory, claims that the literary characteristic that overwhelmingly predominates when describing war is irony. “Every war is ironic because every war is worse than expected” (7). This sense of irony, what Fussell calls “this mechanism of irony-assisted recall” (30), colors all of the best war literature, especially the poetry. As writers look back and try to make sense, “the ironic pattern which subsequent vision has laid over the events” tinges the remembrance (30). “By applying to the past a paradigm of ironic action, a rememberer is enabled to locate, draw forth, and finally shape into significance an event or a moment which otherwise would merge without meaning into the general undifferentiated stream” of events (30).
Often, I want to say inevitably, or almost so, this remembrance conflicts with the ‘official story.’ In Fussell’s words, speaking of WWII in his book Wartime:
- The damage the war visited upon bodies and buildings, planes and tanks and ships, is obvious. Less obvious is the damage it did to intellect, discrimination, honesty, individuality, complexity, ambiguity, and irony, not to mention privacy and wit. For the past fifty years [the book was written in 1989] the Allied war has been sanitized and romanticized almost beyond recognition by the sentimental, the loony patriotic, the ignorant, and the bloodthirsty. I have tried to balance the scale. (ix)
Dulce et Decorum Est
- Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
- Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
* It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.)
- Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
- And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
- Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
- But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
- Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
- Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.
- Gas! Gas! Quick Boys! An ecstasy of fumbling,
- Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
- But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
- And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime…
- Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
- As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
- In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
- He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
- If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
- Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
- And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
- His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
- If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
- Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
- Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
- Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues
- My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
- To children ardent for some desperate glory,
- The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
- Pro patria mori.*
- (
- Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
- It’s practically impossible
- to tell civilians
- from the Vietcong.
- Nobody wears uniforms.
- They all talk
- the same language,
- (and you couldn’t understand them
- even if they didn’t).
- They tape grenades
- inside their clothes,
- and carry satchel charges
- in their market baskets.
- Even their women fight;
- and young boys,
- and girls.
- It’s practically impossible
- to tell civilians
- from the Vietcong;
- after a while,
- you quit trying.
- to tell civilians
- With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.
But let me leave you with the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, from his famous speech in Riverside Church in 1967, when he resolved to “break silence” and speak openly against America’s involvement in Vietnam.
- We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace in Vietnam and justice throughout the developing world a world that borders on our doors. If we do not act we shall surely be dragged down the long dark and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.
- Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter — but beautiful — struggle for a new world. This is the calling of the sons of God, and our brothers wait eagerly for our response. Shall we say the odds are too great? Shall we tell them the struggle is too hard? Will our message be that the forces of American life militate against their arrival as full men, and we send our deepest regrets? Or will there be another message, of longing, of hope, of solidarity with their yearning, of commitment to their cause, whatever the cost? The choice is ours, and though we might prefer it otherwise we must choose in this crucial moment of human history.
(243)
Caputo, Philip, A Rumor of War (New York, 1977)
Ehrhart, W.D., from Unaccustomed Mercy: Soldier-Poets of the Vietnam War, ed. Ehrhart (Texas Tech Press, 1989)
Fussell, Paul, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford U. Press, 1975)
Fussell, Paul, Wartime (Oxford U. Press, 1989)
King, Martin Luther, A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. (Harper San Francisco, 1986)
Lincoln, Abraham, Great Speeches (Dover Thrift Edition, New York, 1991)
Owen, Wilfred, The Poems of Wilfred Owen, ed. Stallworthy (New York, 1986)
[John Hess has been working as a painter for nearly 30 years, for the last four at a major hotel in Boston. For the last 15 years John has also taught English and American Studies at the University of Massachusetts at Boston on a part time basis, where he is also on the executive board and the negotiating team of the Continuing Education unit of the Faculty/Staff Union. Above all, John is a proud father and
grandfather.]
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