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Americans are, in their primary-school years, taught 1) to love themselves, and 2) to cherish their national identity. However, America's adult poets have typically heeded the former injunction while thumbing their noses at the latter. American poets are big on promoting self-esteem, and rightly so, but they are often cynical, sometimes even self-loathing, where the policies of their own government are concerned. Poets such as e. e. cummings, Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell, and Allen Ginsberg (among many others) have taken a scalpel to America's involvement in the first and second world wars, and some of America's more contemporary poets write with equal skepticism and mourning when addressing the nation's participation in the Vietnamese-American conflict of the 1960s and 70s. On the other hand, I have found that much of the Vietnamese poetry about the same war is imbued with a sense of nationalistic pride. Many North Vietnamese poems about the Vietnamese-American war embrace the notion that to die for one's country is valorous and meaningful; these poems preach perseverance over the temptation to surrender and be done with the muck and starvation of endless war; these poems preach self-sacrifice as a great and timeless gift to the self, to the ancestors of the self, to the progeny of the self, and to the land that envelops them all.
Soon, my presentation will look closely at a few poems in order to substantiate the claim that American poets grieve the Vietnam War while Vietnamese poets frequently view the war as an opportunity to exhibit a kind of quiet, never-say-die patriotism. But first my presentation will posit a few theories about why this distinction exists. As I spend the next few minutes (and it really will be just maybe five or six minutes) speaking a few facts and figures about the Vietnam-United States conflict, some of you will hear little or nothing new. In fact, it's a sure bet that I know either a little or a lot less about America's involvement in Vietnam than some of those listening to me right now. Still, the following facts and figures are worth mentioning, since they help to explain why America's response to what happened in Vietnam was and possibly still is charged with confusion, frustration, and shame, and why American poets have accordingly written of the war with grief and remorse. I have come up with three basic reasons.
1) The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution of 1964 essentially gave American president Lyndon Johnson all the powers he would have had if war had indeed been officially declared against North Vietnam, and in the wake of this resolution Johnson initiated Operation Rolling Thunder, which was a relentless bombing campaign in North Vietnam. By the end of the war, the American war machine had dropped an unprecedented tonnage of bombs on North Vietnam, more than double the amount it had dropped on Germany and Japan combined in World War II (Zinn 469), but this systematic bombing seemed to yield little or no gain in the field. Ground soldiers gradually began to realize that the bombing was not driving the North into submission and that it engendered, rather, a colossal waste of civilian lives at a great monetary expense. This of course was because the primary problem facing the American troops was not in the North at all. Instead, it was the presence of the Viet Cong soldiers in the South; these were largely residents of South Vietnam who sympathized with the cause of the North, and in fact it was widely thought that some members of the South Vietnamese Army--the army working with the American military--were "double agents" who also fought with, or at least spied for, the Viet Cong. Despite the mighty bombs of America, then, American troops understood with time that the real war was being fought against a kind of "invisible enemy" made up of shadows and smiling infiltrators, and winning such a war was, it began to seem, strategically impossible. In fact, Robert McNamara, Johnson's Secretary of Defense, told Johnson in 1966 that the war was unwinnable, but the President responded angrily. Two years earlier Johnson had asserted that you cannot "[run] from the Communists: Of course if you start running from the Communists, they may just chase you right into your own kitchen" (qtd. in "War and Protest"). In 1966, then, he seemed to be just as concerned about the expansion of Communism and, too, the global reputation of American mettle. Accordingly, Johnson completely (dare I say arrogantly?) disregarded McNamara's warning and increased the number of military personnel in Vietnam. By 1968, there were roughly 500,000 American troops in Vietnam, and a very high percentage of American soldiers died between 1968 and 1970 . . . died in a war deemed unwinnable by America's highest military authority (Zinn 467). Already sufficiently vexed by the Viet Cong, those Americans who did not die were, by this time, sometimes openly critical of the unworkable and occasionally bizarre military strategies of their own commanders, and they began wondering, moreover, why they were there at all. Many could identify neither their enemy nor the principle for which their friends had been blown to pieces.
2) When you¹re already shaky about the meaning of and justification for what you're doing, and when others, too, are critical--even venomously so--of your behavior, your self-doubt might double, then triple, eventually becoming self-loathing. This fundamental truth of human psychology became manifest in the minds of numerous American soldiers in Vietnam who were, as I've pointed out, already dubious themselves about their purpose and the rightfulness of the American presence in Southeast Asia, and who were also receiving reports that some anti-war protesters back home in America were labeling them vicious murderers with blood-lust. All wars have their detractors, all wars engender protesters for peace, but no war in American history has been denounced the way the Vietnam War was denounced, intensely and relentlessly so. The protests on American soil steadily grew in intensity, largely because of the news crews and photo-journalists who were providing American television viewers and magazine readers with incredible pictures of devastation on both sides of the war, and these protests reached a pitch on May 4, 1970, when four students were shot and killed by National Guardsmen during an anti-war rally on the campus of Kent State University. Of course the Kent State incident served to further the spiritual divide between America's civilians and its armed forces. As I stated just a moment ago, American soldiers in Vietnam were already grappling with malaise and bewilderment; they had already begun to suspect the validity of their purpose, and these home-land protests left some of them feeling nearly diabolical and very much alone: excluded, metaphorically speaking, even from full, participatory citizenship in their own nation, despite the fact that they were wearing American uniforms and in many cases risking their lives in those uniforms daily. As most Americans know, when the veterans of the Vietnam War returned to American soil, many were welcomed home coolly, as if they themselves had initiated the fight, the pillage, and the shameful loss, America's first loss in war.
3) Finally, many of the Americans who fought in Vietnam had something noticeable in common: they weren't, in most cases, the sons and daughters of senators. (That's putting it gently.) The soldiers who bore the brunt of the fighting in Vietnam were, by and large, poor and working-class youngsters who felt more and more as the war dragged on that they were expendable kids dying pretty routinely in a war initiated and maintained by the nation's richer interests. This is not to deny that each soldier was ultimately unique, but it remains true that many came to the service from backgrounds that bespoke similar economic modesty or deprivation. These soldiers had eyes and could see who, for the most part, was suffering the heat, insatiable mosquitoes, and unparalleled fear of Vietnam, could see the disparity between the rich who could afford the costs of college (and thus the deferments enjoyed by those enrolled in college courses) and the poor and working-class kids who could not. In an era dominated by civil rights activism, this obvious breach of parity grew into an especial sore point and for some anti-war protesters even became a rallying cry and a symbol for everything that was wrong with the war. Thus, it increasingly seemed to both the home-land protesters and the soldiers in the field that this war was a David-versus-Goliath affair. This analogy was blatantly applicable to the actual war in Vietnam, where the inhabitants of a fairly tiny, technologically undeveloped country were daily enduring a massive bombing campaign perpetrated by America's apparently invincible war force. But the analogy also fit what was happening at home, where the "Davids," the unlucky poor and working-class kids bound for no college and no upward mobility, lined up to die for the Goliath-like American government. Martin Luther King, Jr., America's great voice of reason during the Vietnam War era, called these young men "the poor of America . . . paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam" (qtd. in Zinn 475).
All of what I have just mentioned--the frustration, the confusion, the self-loathing, the growing bitterness--is unmistakable in so much of the American poetry about the Vietnam War. For the remainder of my presentation, I wish to discuss two poems in particular: one by American poet Bruce Weigl, and one by Vietnamese poet Nguyen Khoa Diem. I am aware, of course, that a single American poem about the Vietnam War is by no means sufficient as a sample; Weigl's poem cannot stand for all American poems about the Vietnam War, and a single Vietnamese-authored poem, likewise, cannot serve fairly as a model for all the Vietnamese poems about the war. (I realize, in other words, that not all American-authored poems about the war are characterized by regret, and not all Vietnamese-authored poems are characterized by patriotism.) Nevertheless, I am bound by a time constraint, and one poem from each nation will have to do.
Bruce Weigl is himself a veteran of the Vietnam War, and his "Song of Napalm" is, on its simplest level, a remembrance of a particular scene he witnessed while in Vietnam. The poem is also a lament, a kind of complaint regarding the poet's inability to forget the vivid horror of the image of war. Weigl left the war in 1970 and published "Song of Napalm" more than fifteen years and several non-military twists and turns later, but for him, the years between the past and the present have a habit of disappearing altogether; in other words, for Weigl, the past can and too often does reach out its talons and execute a choke hold on the present.
"Song of Napalm" begins quietly, even serenely. Most of the first stanza describes, or appears to describe, a bucolic setting just after a rain-storm (33). There seem, at first, to be few worries in this scene: there is a pleasant "mist" as the speaker and his wife stand "in the doorway watching horses / walk off lazily across the pasture's hill" (33). The language is almost charmingly nostalgic: the reverie of a man describing the rare calm of a time spent gazing with his lover at the post-rain stroll of horses: "The grass was never more blue in that light, more / scarlet" (33). At the end of the stanza, however, the poem's mood abruptly shifts when the speaker compares the "crisscrossed" branches of the surrounding trees to "barbed wire," an unlikely comparison and one that reveals the speaker's inability to separate even the peacefullest, most winsome scene from the stark image of war. The wife-figure in the poem is a good partner who lovingly tries to reassure the speaker that the present-day branches are "only branches" that have nothing whatsoever to do with the confused pattern of war-time "barbed wire," something the speaker probably hasn't literally seen in roughly fifteen years. Nevertheless, the speaker's fixation on past images refuses dismissal. He wants to believe that he can, as he says in the second stanza, "[turn] his back on the old curses" (34), but the third stanza immediately and clearly proclaims that he cannot: "But still the branches are wire / and thunder is the pounding mortar" (34). What might be most notable in those lines is the lack of a simile. Whereas the speaker earlier noted that the "branches / crisscrossed the sky like barbed wire" (33; emphasis mine), he now dispenses with the idea that he is comparing two essentially dissimilar things. He ceases to pretend that the present-day image (the "crisscrossed" pattern of the branches of surrounding trees) and the image from the past ("barbed wire") are, for him, two distinct images; he exclaims freely that they are the same image: "the branches are wire" and the "thunder is the pounding mortar." He ceases to make believe that the present needs a simile to serve as a bridge to the past. In fact, the present has become the past, has become haunted by the past.
The reader, when faced with the graphic image that follows, understands why the speaker has such difficulty keeping the past at bay:
still I close my eyes and see the girl
running from her village, napalm
stuck to her dress like jelly,
her hands reaching for the no one
who waits in waves of heat before her. (34)
This image of a burning child holding out her hands for help and finding no relief bespeaks pure horror and substantiates that civilians were too often the casualties of American fire-power in Vietnam. Of course, this child-as-victim image is also a classic illustration of evil. We hope that the Americans did not intend to spray the girl with napalm, but whether they did or did not intend to do so, as this image exclaims, is finally immaterial. She, a guiltless girl, is burning because of an argument between governments about which she probably knows little or, more likely, nothing at all. We wish her a long and happy life; Weigl's speaker does, too, and he even goes so far as to imagine that "she runs down the road and wings / beat inside her until she rises / above the stinking jungle and her pain / eases" (34). However, though the speaker is tormented, he is not delusional. He knows very well that imagining such a happy, angelic ending amounts to a "lie" (34), that the girl does not grow wings and fly away. Instead, she runs and she falls, ablaze with pain, "her burning tendons and crackling / muscles . . . [drawing] her up / into that final position /burning bodies so perfectly assume" (35).
Years after the incident, the speaker remains wracked by guilt and a kind of helplessness at the hands (or "talons," as I said above) of this image of the past. This is not because he sprayed the girl with napalm (he almost surely did not), but rather because he was at that time a part of a system that destroyed so much for a principle that was, as I stated some minutes ago, difficult to name. Let me be clear here: an American soldier in World War II who was involved in the bombing of Dresden, Germany--and who also directly witnessed a German child suffering and dying from wounds caused by American fire-power--might feel similarly shameful and paralyzed, so to speak, by the enduring, horrifying image of a young, innocent victim. And yet, I think it¹s safe to say that most American veterans of World War II viewed (and still view) the fight against Hitler and fascism as a horrible but just affair. The principle for which they fought, for them, was then and is now at least somewhat clear, and therefore that World War II soldier might--and I'm stressing the word "might"--be able to reconcile that ghastly image of the dying German child with his understanding that that war, dreadful as it was, had to be fought. Such equivocation might not help a lot, particularly where the unspeakable image of a tortured child is concerned, but it might help a little. And yet Weigl's speaker is, once again, without even the luxury of having participated in a war that could be reasonably termed "a horrible but just affair;" the Vietnam War was not, in other words, a war that "had to be fought." The little girl in Weigl's poem is therefore burning and dying for nothing; Weigl's speaker knew it then, during the war, and he knows it in the present tense of the poem, too.
My students often point out that the most significant line of the poem is the fourth-to-the-last line: "she is burned behind my eyes" (35). This line states with finality that Weigl's speaker now lives and will forever live with the image of the burning girl. The impression, he says, "is burned behind . . . [his] eyes"; it is permanently etched somewhere in the neighborhood of his retina (figuratively speaking, of course), and this suggests--when accounting for the various refractions that take place even within a single instant of sight--that some shadow or outline of the image is thrown or cast upon everything the speaker looks out upon, that the image has become a kind of background or watermark, an indelible part of his world of sight, sometimes manageably obscure, sometimes bursting forth in appalling directness. There is, then, no happy ending in this poem. He can tell himself lies about wings and the easing of pain, and his good wife can try continually to bring his mind out of the past, into the present, but like a chronic ailment of the body, this image of the dying girl and all that it announces--the waste and the guilt and the shame and the loss--will never completely retreat.
And yet, while Weigl's Vietnam War poem is, above all, a regretful declaration of ruin, the Vietnamese poem I have chosen to highlight in this final section of my presentation speaks of the war in very different terms. Nguyen Khoa Diem's "Lullaby for the Minority Children Growing Up on Their Mothers' Backs" is a more literal poem than Weigl's. And because it is indeed--at least in part--a lullaby to an actual child (as the title states), it is characterized by an almost sugary-sweet tone and an ancient moral: a child should obey, respect, remain loyal to his mother. In fact, the poet seems to be using the child-mother bond in this poem as an analogy for the duty-bound love the average Vietnamese citizen ought to feel for his homeland. As the child loves the mother, the citizen should love his nation and be willing, even honored, to die for the ground on which he was born.
The child and the mother of this poem are, to some extent, actually extensions of the army. They are, in the eyes of the speaker of the poem, devoted contributors to North Vietnam¹s cause of independence. The speaker says proudly that the mother-figure "pounds rice for our soldiers," and the child does his part by sleeping peacefully on her back and not waking to disturb her. If both the mother and the child do their respective parts, the soldiers who depend upon the rice the mother-figure is helping to prepare will be nourished, and, in turn, ready to defend themselves against another attack by the "American soldiers [who] forced . . . [them] to move from the stream" (123). Again, then, there is a sense in this poem that there is no clear dividing line between soldier and civilian in Vietnam: the one may carry a gun and wield a sword while the other may carry a baby and wield a blunt tool for pounding and grinding rice, but both--rather quietly, non-plaintively--perform tasks that serve a single cause or a single national interest. And this obviously stands in stark contrast to the above-mentioned chasm that stood between the American troops and the American protesters rallying on college campuses, in streets throughout the nation, and especially across the acreage of the Mall in Washington, D.C.
The baby-figure of the poem is originally addressed as "Baby Cu Tai" (123), but in the actual verses of the lullaby (featured in the second, fourth, and sixth stanzas), the baby-figure's name is changed to "A Kay": "My A Kay, sleep well A Kay / I love you . . ." (123). Although it's difficult to be sure, it seems very possible that the name "A Kay" is a reference to the Russian-made AK-47 rifle. If so, there seems--initially, at least--to be something ghoulish about a lullaby to a killing machine. If an American--especially one living in the contemporary era--were to sing a lullaby to his M-16 rifle, he'd likely come off as a fanatic living on the fringe of society, a near madman with violence imprinted on his brain. But Diem's poem, perhaps because it is in keeping with the tone of so many Vietnamese-authored poems about the war, somehow manages to avoid the tone of fanaticism; instead, it conveys a sense of candid patriotism, and the "A Kay" of the poem is simply one more piece of the larger effort against the unwelcome presence of America in Vietnam. "A Kay" will help to "beat a new earth," one free of Americans (123). "A Kay" will help "clear ten Ka Lui mountains," purging them of American occupation and restoring them to the Vietnamese (123). "A Kay," the narrator of the poem suggests, will help children to reunite with their mothers and will help the whole nation to live "in Freedom" (125). According to this poem, then, "A Kay," a weapon, is ironically a vehicle to a free, joyful, peaceful life.
Weigl's "Song of Napalm" tells us that the speaker will continue to suffer indefinitely from his unshakable memory of the ghastliness of the Vietnam War, and there is a foretelling of more pain to come in Diem's poem, too, but Diem's speaker seems almost to welcome it as he couches that pain in terms of glory and honor. In the second-to-last stanza of Diem's poem the speaker announces his expectation that the child--Baby Cu Tai--will leave his mother's back and head for the front. He will be hungry, but he will go with neither objection nor regret. Both poems, then, are songs; Weigl's, though, is a "Song of Napalm," a sad song of the horror caused by a war that the speaker obviously feels shouldn¹t have been fought, and Diem's is a lullaby to Vietnamese children, a song-ful, softly whispered request that those children patiently endure hardship and that they quietly cooperate with their mothers as they pound rice and "plant punji sticks" for the soldiers (123).
Earlier, I submitted three reasons why Americans have been inclined to address the war with bitterness or sorrow, but I have not yet posited any reasons for the Vietnamese writers' tendency to follow a contrary path and write of the war in a mood of stoic determination and patriotism. Not being Vietnamese, I find this question more difficult to solve, but I suspect that the answer might have something to do with the fact that the long history of Vietnam is characterized by an almost relentless effort of resistance to foreign invasion. Over a collective period of roughly 4,000 years, an astonishing span of time, the Chinese, the French, the Japanese, the French again, and the Americans have attempted to assume dominion over Vietnam, and the Vietnamese struggle for independence has thus become a way of life, a part of the culture--bequeathed from one generation to the next, and from that one to the next, and on and on. I hope there is nothing offensive in my semantics when I say that by the arrival of the Americans in 1960s, the spirit of national pride and the decisive belief in a give-me-liberty-or-give-me-death principle were, after centuries of struggle, perhaps nearly woven into the DNA of the Vietnamese people. They were on their own soil, defending their own land against invaders; they might have preferred death before defeat, as their ancestors before them fought and died for the same land. I am not suggesting that Americans are without the capacity to die bravely, to go down swinging while holding fast to a principle. Obviously, despite the possibility that American culture tends to prize personal satisfaction and gain over self-sacrifice for the sake of the nation, countless Americans have given their lives for a national cause, and many more will, certainly. But the American soldiers in Vietnam felt increasingly isolated from any conscientious principle for which to fight and die, and many American poems about the war reflect this. The Vietnamese, on the other hand, did possess a fundamental principle for which to fight and die. This principle essentially amounted to an ancient creed, a creed that was as natural to the culture by that point in Vietnamese history as the rains were to the Southeast Asian climate, a creed that insisted it was sweet and fitting to die for the fatherland.
Works Cited
Diem, Nguyen Khoa. "Lullaby for the Minority Children Growing Up on Their Mothers' Backs." Mountain River: Vietnamese Poetry from the Wars (1948-1993). Ed. Kevin Bowen, Nguyen Ba Chung, and Bruce Weigl. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1998. 123 - 25.
"War and Protest: The United States in Vietnam." 15 Dec. 2002 http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/alabaster/A649622.
Weigl, Bruce. "Song of Napalm." Song of Napalm: Poems by Bruce Weigl. New York: Atlantic Monthly, 1988.
Zinn, Howard. A People's History of the United States. New York: Harper & Row, 1980.
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