Vietnam

Vietnam, or the Vietnam War

My friend Palmer Hall recently died of lung cancer. He was a poet friend I only met face to face twice, but we carried on a correspondence, and I read his blog post memories of his years in Vietnam, and his poems about Vietnam.

 Palmer Hall in the late 1960's

Palmer in recent years

I love this piece by Palmer about poetry as a companion to him while he was in Vietnam:

        Some nights in Viet Nam, when I stood alone on the top of

a bunker staring out into a night that contained armies at war,

armies made up of small groups of men searching for each

other, lying in wait, trip wires and claymores, M-16s and AK-47s,

I would see a red cluster of flares shoot into the sky followed,

frequently, by slowly parachuting amber flares that lit the dark...

soft light reflected on piles of hand grenades, belts of fifty caliber

ammunition for the big machine gun, smaller belts for the M-60,

huge cartridges for the M-79 grenade launcher, lighting me wearing

Army greens, flak jacket, camouflage boots, helmet. 

         During those times, letting the two other men, asleep in the

bunker, rest, thinking that an attack might be imminent, my eyes would

drift over the perimeter, looking for any trace of movement out of the

ordinary.  What came to my mind then, what I whispered into the dark,

was poetry that I had memorized long before; mostly, I confess,

poetry about leaving such places.  As the sky lit up at night, I would

whisper from Yeats, "I will arise and go now and go to Inisfree..." or

from Eliot, "Let us go then, you and I / when the evening is spread

out against the sky / like a patient etherized  upon a table." 

         Somewhere off in the distance, I might hear a fire fight near

where I had seen the red cluster flare; and Hardy's "Convergence of the

Twain" would breathe out from me.  There was great consolation in poetry,

Innisfree almost becoming a mantra.

        In those days, not writing, I lived poetry, sucking it in and

blowing it out.  In Dak To, when I listened to my radio, heard a boy

named Bao report on American convoys leaving the camp for Pleiku and

heard the jets strafe and napalm his position, the poetry that is Yeats

and the poetry that is Stevens (O blessed rage for order,

pale Ramon!) mingled with red dust and death.

        I can remember still, through something of a red haze, getting

absurdly drunk on a fifth of ruffino's chianti (the club was out of scotch

and all other drinks) and wandering down to the perimeter.  I climbed up

on the berm and looked out at the valley and the hills, Eben Flood had

nothing on me that evening; and I held the remains of the bottle in my

hand, seeing only one moon, and out Heroded Herod in declaiming

the opening lines from Shakespeare's Henry V, snarling the words,

"And at his heels leashed in like hounds, should famine, sword and

fire crouch for employment!" and moving on to "Once more onto the

breach, dear friends, once more / or close up the wall with our English

dead!!" 

         And then moving to Hamlet and the first great soliloquy, "Oh

that this too too solid flesh / would melt, thaw and resolve itself into a

dew / or that the Almighty had not fixed his canon gainst self-slaughter." 

         I remember all the details of the Shakespearean soliloquys and the

poems I sang into a drunk night during the Tet Offensive of 1968,

but I remember none of the generalities.

           

       (  Orig. Pub.: Texas Writers Newsletter.  Fall, 1995)

Here are two of his poems:

"From the Periphery"

1.

Spotlights shine out a hundred  feet

or more, show tufts of green where grass

plowed under, struggles, shoots up. 

I whisper to Claymores, 50 calibers, 

M-60s, hold the dead weight of an M-79, 

listen to the sounds of water buffalo and

of a distant firefight.  

In that dark, men I have not really

come to know wait quietly, barely breathe

in fear that someone else will hear their breath,

hunker down, eyes barely  open, listen

to their hearts beat, to night sounds

grown suddenly quiet. 

The singsong cries of hootchmaids

bring me back from a place I will never go

and only, so far down inside, almost

convince myself to regret never having been. 

2.

One  morning in Dak To, I saw five men

who had been six, LRRPs, kicking dirt 

into the sky,  eyes focused  straight ahead,

silent, wrung dry in the hot sun.  

Sometimes commerce can not exist.  Language

can not always be enough, words can not

translate what eyes have seen.

Thoughts lie fallow, spears of grass

that can not push up or out. 

This, then, is what war must be:  a walk

in the night, heart held in the hands of those

who walk beside you,  breath held in each

other's mouths, smell shared in such a way

that all scents are one, touch only

a light pressure, hand on shoulder,

eyes searching for movement in the dark.

        (Orig. In From the Periphery: poems and essays

            Chili Verde Press, 1995)

Hospital Visit

--For the survivors

I give her a puppet--an armadillo,

fuzzy and warm, to slip over her hand

in the dark when there is no one near

only time to think and a dark marble of fear

that awakens, pulses deep down in a silent

spot that no one knows but she. Tom,

her husband, died somehow in Viet Nam

and she has kept the pain in that same place

for all these years, has hardly talked

of those deep jungles where his body lay.

The doctor comes and speaks of this and that,

cool and calm, detached: of the mastectomy

to be deferred for chemo, the bone scan positive,

biopsy positive, mestastasis into the bone. Sterile words,

remote from the throbbing space that whispers in her blood.

"Yes, it's raining." I say.

"Yes, your sons are here."

She feels the lump in her breast, a pressure, a weight.

She says "I don't need it anyway. My sons are grown."

She says, "My husband died so long ago. I don't need

to talk about the war." She strokes the puppet. "I want

quiet, rest and peace." A steady stream of visitors troops

into her room, brings sweet flowers with perfume

that palls and mingles somehow with the silent

drip of an IV in her hand. A slow anointing,

laying on of hands: fingers trace a cross with water,

touch her head, but it is not the sacrament of the dead,

only a rite for healing, something to contend with that

central core where dark shapes gather. How hard

it is to be polite, to kiss, to hug, to shake each hand.

"I'm fine," she says. "I only need a little sleep."

She smiles. I take her hand, slip the puppet on.

These poems are reproduced from an anthology of poems and essays

dealing with Viet Nam, (Hall, H. Palmer. From the Periphery: Essays and Poems.

San Antonio: Chili Verde Press, 1994.).

These were posted on the website

 http://www.vietvet.org