Healing

The facilitator of our veterans art group gave all of us a copy of this. She mentioned the author’s name. I can’t remember it, although I remember that the author is a woman. If I could give her credit, I would. Although considering what she wrote, I doubt that she would mind me posting her words. They speak for themselves.

Healing

Takes place in our natural rhythm.

We are creatures of nature. Nature moves: MEDIUM TO SLOW.

Stay in the natural rhythm. Danger: the fast lane!!! Stay out of it. It can be dangerous.
Only go in the fast lane for brief moments.

Longings: what is calling me? There are many longings at various junctures in our life.

Longing=belonging. What new experience do I long for?


Ask these questions of yourself every day.

1.What made me happy today?

2.Where did I experience comfort, peace, deep satisfaction, and contentment?

3.Who or what inspired me today?

If I track my happiness I will find “fire.” I will identify what I need—what I long for.

A Scene at Point Reyes

I have been posting poems and thoughts concerning war and veterans issues since I began this blog. And I am now writing a memoir concerning my year in Vietnam. This stuff is intense and I need a break from that kind of intensity. Those who read this blog might also want a break. I wrote this poem after taking a walk with a friend who worked at Point Reyes National Seashore last year. Point Reyes is located a few miles north of San Francisco. I was a beautiful sunny and foggy day.


Rocks, a Ridge, and Waters
(Dedicated to Lana Schide, the young woman friend with whom I shared the scene.)

Below its saddle, a narrow
brief ridge that
connects two coastline rock masses
separates the ocean and the cove.

The wild, powerful,
even tumultuous beauty of
vast waters
buffeting jagged rocks
and the sands of the shore
juxtaposed with
the tranquil beauty of
the calm, and sheltered,
and deep
other waters.

Standing above on the south rock
in the fog, in the midst of
the mist, I peer into
the wild, the powerful,
the tumultuous, the vast,
the calm, the sheltered, and
the deep.

The scene, the awful, disturbs
and challenges my spirit;
It resonates with
my soul.

Convergence

The incident that this poem describes I believe happened a few weeks after the first and largest battle our battalion experienced. We had lost many men. For me, war was a complex experience.

Convergence

Each end of our quarter
Circle perimeter touched
The banks of two streams
Slightly above where their
Waters’ converged.
Orders were to kill
Whoever moved inside.

The sun set.
Hours later, when the
Celestial lights
Shown through the
Tenebrous clouds,
There came the sound
Of movement. From the
Brush at water’s edge,
At the point of the streams’
Meeting, he emerged.
After a few seconds,
it became clear that
he carried no weapon.

Holding a farming tool or
The navigating pole of his boat
He walked toward
My position—toward me.
“Should I fire?”
“Is he VC or a farmer with a
Family—or both—caught
Out after curfew?”

He kept striding while
I sat with my
M-16. As he walked
By we shared an un-
Comfortable look. Then
I peered as his figure
Faded into the night
And into my memory.


Robert Jost

Tenderness

“Tenderness” was the second poem I wrote. It was twenty-seven years after the fact. I hadn’t thought of this incident until the fall of 1995. The memories that forms “Tenderness” came to me in parts. I wrote a first draft, however, I knew something was missing. A few days later, while I lay on my bed relaxing the most intense memories that make up this poem slowly appeared in my mind.

Tenderness

I remember a few days or
A week or two before the night we
Had a couple of good conversations—
The ones that touch to the depth.
We talked of combat, of your being
Wounded twice and, I’m sure,
Of the simple things that moved us.

That night in Anu Tan, on
December the 10th, in the midst
Of the battle, while I was on
The chopper pad ready to
Send more wounded out on
Dust-offs*, I saw you coming
Toward me, helping—bringing
A wounded brother in. When
I looked I saw that you were
Wounded, but you said,
“Only slightly,” “There are more
Wounded on the perimeter,” you said.
Then you turned to go back and help.
I almost let you, but something
I sensed said, “Don’t let him go.”
Then that something from
Deep within me welled up
And I said, tentatively,
“Get on that chopper,” but you
Couldn’t hear from the noise.
Then it welled up to fill me
And it broke through. I ran
To you as you walked away
And grabbed you by the back
Of your fatigue jacket, and stopped
You. When you turned in
Surprise I looked at you and in
The fear that I couldn’t persuade
You and almost in desperation,
With all the strength my twenty-
Year-old spirit could muster,
The words exploded out
From me: “Get on that chopper,
Get the fuck out of this
Motherfuckin’ place!
Don’t go back and get killed!”
I said, “I’d get on if I could,
But I ain’t wounded. This is
Your third time**. It’ll get you
Off the line, so go yourself since
You have the chance!” I begged—
Almost forced you to leave.

I don’t remember your name, but
I will never forget the look we
Shared through that open
As that chopper lifted off, when
I stared into your dark face,
Into your eyes, as we were
Surrounded by the noise and
The turbulence created by the
Motor and those blades that
Drowned out the sound of sporadic
Small arms fire and exploding
Rounds; we shared that quick,
Yet intense look
Lighted by that flare-lit night.

I will never forget the Love.



*med-evac helicopter
**It was customery in Vietnam that a soldier who was wounded three times would be given a rear position away from combat.

Robert Jost

Hearts and Souls and Lives

This blog has a major theme that could interest combat veterans and those who interact with them. Considering this it might be beneficial to consider combat veteran Davidson Loehr’s words that call for empathy and compassion from those who would associate with such veterans. His words suggest the basis from which care for veterans need to proceed. Loehr drew on Herbert Butterfield’s critique of documented history. Butterfield comments that the condensation of history into a manageable form eliminates the “chaos” that makes up historical reality:

"There is not an essence of history that can be got by evaporating the human and personal factors, the incidental or momentary or local things, and the circumstantial elements, as though at the bottom of the well there were something absolute, some thing independent of time and circumstance . . . The chaos [of history] acquires form by virtue of what we choose to omit."

Loehr applies Butterfield’s commentary to the healing relationships between Vietnam War combat veterans and caring individuals.

"‘The chaos acquires form by virtue of what we choose to omit.’ In the cases of Vietnam era veterans, the chaos acquires form only by omitting the hearts and souls and lives of the veterans themselves. So that’s really my message and my hope: that you will not try to understand, not try to assign moral values to the stories of individuals in Vietnam, not try to come to an attitude of certainty about the right and wrong of it all. Rather, if you would try to be with us at all, be with us in the chaos and let yourself become confused and disoriented, all awash with feelings, hurts, and memories of both joys and regrets that will never be fully sorted out, never be fully assimilated, and never be gone.
Then, perhaps, we can begin to come home again."

The ambiguity in the word “we” in the last line of Loehr’s statement suggests the benefit for veterans and others. “Coming home” is based on the truths that both Vietnam war veterans and combat veterans of other wars and their friends and associates must come to know. These are truths about humanity that if accepted will help make veterans, minister, associates, and friend whole or at home with themselves.

Credits:
Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Understanding of History (New York: Norton, 1965): 31,66,68, 97. Quoted in Davidson Loehr, “To Care Without Judging” The University of Chicago Magazine. (Spring 1985): 49, in Walter Capps, Ed. The Vietnam Reader. (New York: Routledge, 1991): 25.

Davidson Loehr, “To Care without Judging” The University of Chicago Magazine. (Spring 1985): 49, in Walter Capps, ed. In The Vietnam Reader: 25.

A Prophetic Message

The poet Ted Hughes wrote this poem with young men in mind. Young women participated in combat now. His words now concern both genders. This poem hangs on the door of an Oakland, California Veterans Administration counselor.

Do not madden our young men
With the hiss of the whetstone
And the dream . . . of purging themselves
Of all their bodily violence
In the rapture of battle.
Do not addict them
To the drug of danger --
The dream of the enemy
That has to be crushed, like a herb,
Before they can smell freedom.

Desperation and Devotion

In a class that I attended while in graduate school, Generation X Spirituality, one of the projects that our professor proposed was to make prayer beads. I decided to make a rosary because I have a devotion to that form of prayer. In one class, class members shared their individual experiences with prayer beads. I did not speak until the end of class when, from deep within me, powerful emotions rose along with the memory of a rosary that I carried for a while in Vietnam. A couple of years passed. However, the memory of my experience with that rosary and the memory of my emotional experience in class prompted the following poem.

A Rosary

They always broke
or disintegrated in my pocket.
The ones made of string rotted
when they got wet. The ones made with wire chain
kept breaking apart.

Then the reluctant solution, possibly a sacrilege.
I’d break off ten rounds of linked machine gun ammo.
That’d hold together.
I’d pray on them when we broke
in rice paddies, in villages, along
dikes, next to V.C. bunkers, while on guard, in basecamp,
in the field, on night or day patrol, under fire
So that I’d be able to love.
Something in me had begun to give up on everything else.



Robert Jost

Credits: First published in Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace edited by Maxine Hong Kingston, Koa Books, Kihei, Hawai'i