Vietnam War poetry (iv) War veteran poets: Awar poet, according to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, is a poet writing in time of, and on the subject of war. The term, which is applied especially to those in military service, was documented as early as 1848 in reference to German revolutionary poet, Georg Herwegh. The Vietnam War has produced scores of poets, both American and Vietnamese and the poetry about the Vietnam War continues to move readers with its stark expression of grief. In the realisation that their pain was ‘not private' in the catastrophic sense they thought it was, and that their former enemy the ‘goads' had suffered from, and still live through the trauma of war, American veteran poets have begun to bridge a chasm of ignorance and pain, said Subarno Chatargi, an expert on Vietnam War literature. Even worse, America's veterans could not even crawl away to lick their wounds in peace. Without even the illusion of a satisfactory resolution, the war ground on for years after most veterans had come home, and the fall of Saigon has been followed by one reminder after another: the boat people, the amnesty issue, Agent Orange, delayed stress, the occupation of Cambodia, the bombing of the Marine barracks in Bierut, the mining of Nicaragua's harbors. The initial rejection of Vietnam veterans, and the long silence of the 70's which followed (during which time Vietnam veterans were routinely stereotyped as drug-crazed, emotionally unbalanced misfits), have only given way to Rambo, Chuck Norris, and the sorry spectacle of America's Vietnam veterans driven to build monuments to themselves and throw parades in their own honour. It is hardly any wonder that so many former soldiers have turned to the solitude of pen and paper. Under conditions such as these, there has been more than enough reason and plenty of time for once-idealistic youngsters to consider the long and hard war they fought, the government and the society that sent them to fight it, and the values they had once believed in. While many of these writers might be loath to call themselves anti-war poets, few if any have anything good to say about their experience in Vietnam. Wanting to revive awareness of the Vietnam War, which he sees slipping into oblivion because Americans would rather not talk about it, editor Philip Mahony, a New York City police officer, had arranged poems by 135 poets in chronological order ‘to simulate the progression of the Vietnam War'. Poems of the North and South Vietnamese, ‘boat people', and post-war Vietnamese American second-generation poets appear beside well-known names (e.g., Ehrhart, Komunyakaa, and Weihl). On his way to Vietnam, Lary Rottmann, a veteran poet, muses on the motivations of his journey back: “I wanted to meet these folks. To hold them. To touch them. Smell their life and sweat. I want to know they are alive, especially the children. I need to be reassured that we didn't kill or poison them all”. Therefore, going back to Vietnam helped many veterans to ameliorate the sense of exile they felt in the US. It was an extension of the homecoming theme discernible in earlier veteran poetry, a projection of Vietnam as a redemptive landscape. Some of the Vietnamese contributors, widely published in the "global Vietnamese community", deserve more recognition. Among them are Bao-Long Chu, Nguyen Chi Thien, Barbara Tran, and Tran Mong Tu. This useful anthology of multicultural, warscarred poetry might help erase "Nam Nightmares'. The poems in the first part mark the self-immolations of Buddhists in Saigon and a Quaker in Washington DC, and the injunctions of saber-rattling politicians. Thus came clutches of combat poems, protest poems, poems of stoic endurance, poems about bombings and atrocities, poems about those additionally victimised during the war (black soldiers, women, children), poems about the American evacuation, poems of exile and immigration, poems about the Vietnam Wall, and poems by young adults seeking parents and cultures lost decades ago. Only a vast oral history combined with a vast philosophical novel might surpass this collection's portrayal of how what happened in Vietnam has affected the ordinary people swept up in it.
