A Poem From My Friend Rick

I have been visiting my friend Rick for the past few days. We both served in the same company while in Vietnam during 1967. This evening Rick brought out his "Vietnam Box," a box with a few memento's of his year in war. This poem was in the box, which he had not opened for more than ten years. He wrote it sometime before June 19, 1967, the day of our battalion's most disastrous battle. He knows that he wrote this poem before that day because after the battle he could not write and remembers little of the rest of his year at war.

For Love of God and Nation?

Why me? What did I do?
I gave no one cause to
even feel blue.

Yet now I must go,
thru the muck and the mire
and lord help my soul,
if I ever should tire
for this is a war
such as never before
where no man can rest
lest the enemy come out best
for tho they're farmers by day
come night they're away
to bring havoc on men
that could be my kin

Why me? What did I say?
Why did my neighbors give me away?
To sweat and to toil
on the enemy soil
To fight for my life
For the love of my wife.

They say for the love of God and my nation
I must go through hell and damnation
And try tho I may
I can't get away

Why Me?

From A Walk in the Garden of Heaven

I have been re-reading Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace. Something in this passage resonates with me.

"Whatever it is holds us in a spell of wonder when we are children, abandoned me when the war began. I don't mean just me or just youth, I mean something about this country. But I don't mean just this country, I mean the world. I've spent my time searching for what it is, like a suicide who refuses to die, an optimist who is empty, a buoy on th sea."

George Evans. "A Walk in the Garden of Heaven," Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace. Maxine Hong Kingston, ed. Kiheri, Hawai'i: Koa Books, 2005. pg. 88

A Church Service

I remember attending church services in Vietnam only a few times. For the most part, we were in the field on small combat operations and away from such religious opportunities. However, one service has set an indelible mark on my memory. It was during the mid part of my tour. Our unit had been in the field for some time and it had been a mouth and a half or two months since I had attended mass. After this period, our company arrived at Doug Tam near the city of My Tho; the 9th Infantry Division southern most major base camp in the Mekong Delta. It was Sunday when we arrived at this camp and after we had unloaded our gear and set up in barracks, I felt a compelling need to find a chapel and the celebration of Catholic mass. I asked around and someone pointed me in the direction across the camp. He said that the chapel was quite a distance away. I set off in late mid afternoon for what I would find was a trek through the dusty base roads. It was a walk in the Delta humidity and hot sun. I was tired when I started and as I walked, I became more tired. On my trek I lost my way a couple of times and had to ask for directions.

When I arrived at the chapel, I walked in to this round wooden building. It had a low rising dome and windows set in around the exterior wall of the structure. Glass windows were unusual in this war zone as explosions from incoming mortar rounds could blow them inward. Although it was not large, it was an impressive structure in the midst of long barracks and other rectangular military buildings most of which were covered with canvas roofs. I was hot, dusty, and tired and felt frustrated after the long walk. Inside the chapel, the altar was set in front of the wall near the door through which I entered. The floor was laid in long planks and the ceiling was open with its beams exposed. A semi-circle of wooden pews, maybe ten rows deep, surrounded the altar on three sides. I quietly took a seat near the door at the right of the altar. In my distraction, I hadn’t taken the misselette from the table next to the door. The misselette is a book with the mass prayers and bible reading for the mass of the day. One man kindly walked to me and gave me a misselette. I must have looked uncomfortable and unfamiliar with the proceedings so this man, a young guy like me, opened the book to the proper page. I reacted in a frustrated way. Some of my religions pride poked out and I said to myself “what’s this guy doing, I’m know what’s going on.” In a few minutes, I began to relax and I settled in for the service. It was early in the mass, the time just after the opening prayers. A soldier got up, walked to the altar, and read the first two readings for the day, one from the Old Testament and the other from the New. I don’t remember the message of those scripture readings nor that of the Gospel passage that the priest read; however, I do remember a few words from the priest’s sermon. They are engraved in my mind.

The priest, a taller man with short graying hair who looked to be in his late forties or early fifties, stood squarely at the ambo at the left of the alter. He spoke about love to the soldiers present. However, his words in no way reflect the Christian message in I Corinthians 13: “Love is patient; love is kind; . . . it does not rejoice in wrongdoing . . . Love never fails . . .” This priest’s words sent another message as he boldly proclaimed a moral stance, “It’s alright to kill as many Vietnamese as you can and you can have sex with as many women as you want. But just make sure that love your buddies!” At first his words sounded appealing. They gave me permission to do things that my teachers and ministers taught were wrong. Then the full impact of what he said set in and I thought, “this man is nuts!” “How could he say such thing and from the alter.” His words shocked me. I was in a daze for the rest of the mass, almost reeling from his words that had little to do with the Christian love instilled in me as I grew up. After the mass, I left the chapel and as I walked back to my barracks anger permeated me as this priest’s words that condoned violence, even unnecessary and indiscriminate violence, and the sexual use of women swirled in my head. I knew that acting on what he said would profoundly inhibit the experience of love for which I longed.

A Thanksgiving Poem

Anne Porter's poem, "A List of Praises," is a finely worked Thanksgiving poem especially if we consider that thanksgiving and praise are two sides of the same coin.



A List of Praises

Anne Porter

Give praise with psalms that tell the trees to sing,

Give praise with Gospel choirs in storefront churches,

Mad with the joy of the Sabbath,

Give praise with the babble of infants, who wake with the sun,

Give praise with children chanting their skip-rope rhymes,

A poetry not in books, a vagrant mischievous poetry

living wild on the Streets through generations of children.

Give praise with the sound of the milk-train far away

With its mutter of wheels and long-drawn-out sweet whistle

As it speeds through the fields of sleep at three in the morning,

Give praise with the immense and peaceful sigh

Of the wind in the pinewoods,

At night give praise with starry silences.

Give praise with the skirling of seagulls

And the rattle and flap of sails

And gongs of buoys rocked by the sea-swell

Out in the shipping-lanes beyond the harbor.

Give praise with the humpback whales,

Huge in the ocean they sing to one another.

Give praise with the rasp and sizzle of crickets, katydids and cicadas,

Give praise with hum of bees,

Give praise with the little peepers who live near water.

When they fill the marsh with a shimmer of bell-like cries

We know that the winter is over.

Give praise with mockingbirds, day's nightingales.

Hour by hour they sing in the crepe myrtle

And glossy tulip trees

On quiet side streets in southern towns.

Give praise with the rippling speech

Of the eider-duck and her ducklings

As they paddle their way downstream

In the red-gold morning

On Restiguche, their cold river,

Salmon river,

Wilderness river.

Give praise with the whitethroat sparrow.

Far, far from the cities,

Far even from the towns,

With piercing innocence

He sings in the spruce-tree tops,

Always four notes

And four notes only.

Give praise with water,

With storms of rain and thunder

And the small rains that sparkle as they dry,

And the faint floating ocean roar

That fills the seaside villages,

And the clear brooks that travel down the mountains

And with this poem, a leaf on the vast flood,

And with the angels in that other country.

Viet Cong Tax Collector

I’m carrying the radio for my squad leader, the PRC-25 known as a “prick 25.”
It’s a gray day as we stand in a dry rice paddy. The large row of high bushes with long thin leaves next to us is brown and dry. Clumps of brown dead rice stalks dot the baked and cracked paddies that were in recent months green, lush and filled with water. One of our platoons has sent out a patrol to reconnoiter the surrounding area.

The static squelch of my radio handset indicating a transmission breaks the relative quiet. I begin listening to the transmitted interaction. The leader of the recon patrol, a young sergeant, radios in; “We’ve got a VC tax collector here! He was walking down the road with an old M-1*. He’s an old skinny little guy and he keeps talking in Vietnamese, smiling, and bowing to us. Where shall we take him for questioning.” The voice, an officer on the other end of the transmission, says, “he’s dead.” The squad leader radios back, “you don’t understand; I have a prisoner here. I need to bring him in.” The voice on the other end that’s flat, showing little emotion, and yet malicious says, “I do understand. “He’s dead.” Finally, the squad leader calls back, pleading, “He’s a prisoner, according to the Geneva Convention he deserves protection, where shall I take him!” The officer sends the same reply, “he’s dead!”

I’m feelin’ sorry for the old man, picturing him in my mind, and I’m wishin,’ “I hope they don’t shoot the little guy.” I feel sorry for the patrol leader whose received tacit orders to commit a summary execution and think; “I sure wouldn’t want to live with that guilt if he kills the man.” In a few minutes, shots ring out and I’m continuing to hope, “they shot in the air, broke up the M-1, and let the guy go.” Then reality sets in and I realize that someone, likely the patrol leader, is standing with his weapon over the body of an old skinny Vietnamese man who wanted to live. Now, the man’s dead. There’s a hole in his head and I’m hatin’ the voice and the man who gave the order.

In writing this anecdote, I realize how much anger and hate are still present in me. Moreover, I realize how much I need to forgive.

*The M-1 is a World War II vintage American military rifle.

The Common Good

Vincent Miller, in an article in the National Catholic Reporter, speaks of our country's loss of the humane and essential ideal of the "common good." Below is a short excerpt from his article.


"Our instincts for the common good have been dulled by an economic system that reduces us all to individuals. Gone are mutual aid societies, local credit unions, and even company pensions. We’re all on our own now, masters of shrinking 401k accounts. We turn to credit cards in rough times rather than sharing with family and neighbors. Standing alone with our [desire for] tax cuts, we are all going down the tubes together."*

*Vincent Miller. "Catholic 'common good' notions embedded in Obama politics." www.ncronline.com. Nov. 1, 2008.

Night In Blue

Brian Turner sums up a year in war.

Night in Blue*

At seven thousand feet and looking back, running lights
blacked out under the wings and America waiting,
a year of my life disappears at midnight,
the sky a deep viridian, the houselights below
small as match heads burned down to embers.

Has this year made me a better lover?
Will I understand something of hardship,
of loss, will a lover sense this
in my kiss or touch? What do I know
of redemption or sacrifice, what will I have
to say of the dead—that it was worth it,
that any of it made sense?
I have no words to speak of war.
I never dug the graves in Talafar.
I never held the mother crying in Ramadi.
I never lifted my friend’s body
when they carried him home.

I have only the shadows under the leaves
to take with me, the quiet of the desert,
the low fog of Balad, orange groves
with ice forming on the rinds of fruit.
I have a woman crying in my ear
late at night when the stars go dim
moonlight and sand as a resonance
of the dust of bones, and nothing more.

*Turner, Brian. "Night in Blue," in Here Bullet. Farmington, Maine: Alice James Books, 2005. Pg. 64