Inheriting the War Read online

  INHERITING

  THE WAR

  Poetry and Prose

  by Descendants of Vietnam

  Veterans and Refugees

  Edited by LAREN McCLUNG

  W. W. Norton & Company

  Independent Publishers Since 1923

  New York | London

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  for those who saw the war,

  & the next generations

  &

  for Andrea, Katie, Linda, & Pop

  CONTENTS

  Foreword by Yusef Komunyakaa

  The Lost Pilot by James Tate

  Introduction

  QUAN BARRY

  from “child of the enemy”

  TOM BISSELL

  from The Father of All Things

  STAR BLACK

  To a War Correspondent

  Recollection

  LILY KATHERINE BOWEN

  Lanterns

  Falling

  EMILY BRANDT

  from Air Age

  Petroleum

  Kapok

  Cork

  Ash

  Silk

  CATHY LINH CHE

  Split

  Los Angeles, Manila, Đà Nẵng

  TERESA MEI CHUC

  from Year of the Hare

  BRANDON COURTNEY

  Prometheus

  Year Without Dusting

  Achilles, Veterans’ Hospital (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania)

  LINH DINH

  Viet Cong University

  Prisoner with a Dictionary

  DAVID ELLIS

  Aphasia

  HEINZ INSU FENKL

  from Memories of My Ghost Brother

  NICK FLYNN

  Practical Joke

  from The Ticking Is the Bomb

  TERRANCE HAYES

  The Long Shadow of War

  JENNIFER JEAN

  In the War

  ADAM KARLIN

  How I Didn’t Find My Father’s War in Vietnam

  ELMO KEEP

  The Book I Didn’t Write

  ANDREW LAM

  The Stories They Carried

  LÊ THỊ DIỄM THÚY

  The Gangster We Are All Looking For

  NAM LE

  Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice

  T.K. LÊ

  Part of Memory Is Forgetting

  ADA LIMÓN

  Listen

  BRIAN MA

  July in Vietnam

  Aerial

  SJOHNNA McCRAY

  How to Move

  Bedtime Story #1

  GARDNER McFALL

  Missing

  On the Line

  Blue Raft

  PHILIP METRES

  The Things They Carried That We Carry

  from Hung Lyres

  MỘNG-LAN

  Field

  A New Việt Nam

  JUAN J. MORALES

  The Cloverleaf

  Phobias

  JOHN MURILLO

  Trouble Man

  NGÔ TỰ LẬP, TRANSLATED FROM THE VIETNAMESE BY MARTHA COLLINS AND THE AUTHOR

  Women from the 1960s (I)

  A Bullet Fired into the Night

  BICH MINH NGUYEN

  The Good Immigrant Student

  HOA NGUYEN

  Agent Orange Poem

  Independence Day 2010

  HIEU MINH NGUYEN

  Buffet Etiquette

  Cockfight

  Tater Tot Hot-Dish

  PHONG NGUYEN

  The Wheel of History

  NGUYEN PHAN QUE MAI, TRANSLATED FROM THE VIETNAMESE BY BRUCE WEIGL AND THE AUTHOR

  The Boat Girl

  My Mother

  Quảng Trị

  NGUYỄN QUANG THIỀU, TRANSLATED FROM THE VIETNAMESE BY MARTHA COLLINS AND THE AUTHOR; KEVIN BOWEN AND THE AUTHOR

  The Examples

  My Father’s Laughter

  July

  August

  VAAN NGUYEN, TRANSLATED FROM THE HEBREW BY ADRIANA X. JACOBS

  Mekong River

  Packing Poem

  VIET THANH NGUYEN

  April 30

  DEBORAH PAREDEZ

  Lavinia Writing in the Sand

  A History of Bamboo

  SUZAN-LORI PARKS

  Father Comes Home from the Wars (Part 1)

  Father Comes Home from the Wars (Part 3)

  Playing Chopsticks (Father Comes Home from the Wars, Part 7)

  Father Comes Home from the Wars (Part 11: His Eternal Return—A Play for My Father)

  ANDREW X. PHAM

  The Fall of Saigon

  AIMEE PHAN

  Motherland

  BAO PHI

  War Before Memory: A Vietnamese American Protest Organizer’s History Against Miss Saigon

  BEN QUICK

  The Boneyard

  ASHLEY ROMANO

  Jersey City

  JOSEPHINE ROWE

  Vanellinae

  What I Know of Doorways

  Love

  LEVI RUBECK

  Yellow Flare

  Mall Flare

  KAREN RUSSELL

  Underground in Vietnam

  BRIAN SCHWARTZ

  Invasion

  MONICA SOK

  Kampuchean Skin

  Left-Behind Looks for the Apsaras

  When the War Was Over

  KIM THÚY, TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH BY SHEILA FISCHMAN

  from Ru

  PAUL TRAN

  Self-Immolation

  Heirloom

  JULIE THI UNDERHILL

  The Silent Opening

  war dreams

  MAI DER VANG

  Light from a Burning Citadel

  I the Body of Laos and All My UXOs

  When the Mountains Rose Beneath Us, We Became the Valley

  CHI VU

  The Uncanny

  VUONG QUOC VU

  Twenty Two

  The Year of the Pig

  Flower Bomb

  OCEAN VUONG

  The Weight of Our Living: On Hope, Fire Escapes, & Visible Desperation

  ZACHARY WATTERSON

  A Soundtrack of the War

  ADAM WIEDEWITSCH

  Fisherman’s Hang

  Saint Michael, with Agent Orange

  HANH NGUYEN WILLBOND

  War Music Awakening for Soldier’s Daughter

  Song of Napalm (by Bruce Weigl)

  MATTHEW WIMBERLEY

  Two Days Home

  In My Father’s Words, 1969

  KAREN SPEARS ZACHARIAS

  The Man in the Jeep

  Acknowledgments

  Permissions

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  INHERITING

  THE WAR

  FOREWORD

  YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA

  They have left a pool

  made of father, mother, and child.

  Let us look

  in it,

  look for our own blood and bones,

  look for them in the mud of Vietnam . . .

  —PABLO NERUDA (from “In Vietnam,”

  translated by Ilan Stavans)

  As I reflect, it seems as if I’m transposed, standing in the atmosphere of a memory—a feeling, a place. I can see the room. I can hear a voice. Usually I’m listening acutely. In this memory, time is sequential. I am standing in the living room where my great-uncle is asleep and I hear him sob and cry out. This is not the first time I hear him this way. But in this memory, I am six or seven, and, only the way a child can, I ask, “What you crying ’bout, Uncle Jesse?”

  He rises, sits on the edge of th
e couch, takes my hand, and says, “I was on a death detail overseas. Soldiers were droppin’ like flies. We cut trenches in the ice. I learned what dog tags are good for: I put one into the mouth of each dead soldier and the other dog tag in a canvas bag, and we pushed the dead into ditches till we come back to dig ’em up.” Then he rolls a cigarette from his red can of Prince Albert.

  My great-uncle Jesse was a veteran of World War I. He fought under the French flag because at the time the US military was segregated. This image of him digging up corpses from the trenches recurred in my psyche; it had already begun to direct my childhood play where one fights imaginary wars. But perhaps this knowing also created a real sense of reflection—at only six or seven, I wasn’t eager to pretend to be dead. I knew something about the truth of war. “I learned how to dig graves and gamble. That’s all I learned,” he’d say. And “you know, I need to go back to France.”

  The man never stopped talking in his sleep.

  Mama Mary, my maternal grandmother, had one rule. Whenever he knocked on her front door, he’d pause at the threshold, and she would say, “Wait here, Jesse.” She’d return, holding out with both hands a white handkerchief, and he would place his .38 Smith & Wesson Special onto it, and she would wrap the pistol and place it into the chifforobe in her bedroom, lock it, and put the key into her apron pocket.

  This ritual between them taught me the rules of inclusion and ways to negotiate a space. Such rituals create the illusion that we are in control of the larger world and its mysteries. Here was this man who had carried the gun as part of his identity, and he was handing it over to my grandmother as if handing over his role as a man, as a soldier; instead, now, he could relax; he could be a brother, an uncle. He could momentarily undo the rituals of war that had shaped him when he was seventeen.

  In childhood, I had not become aware that I was internalizing these rituals, but I vividly remember each action, each image. I grew up with framed photographs of soldiers displayed on ornate shelves and tables in living rooms of small Southern houses. They were presented in the same way sports trophies are displayed—with pride and ceremony. The war had come home in multitudinous disguises and changed faces. I encountered these images of men dressed in World War II uniforms—men in my family and community—on display without any real dialogue about it. Four of my great-uncles had been in that war overseas.

  When I was a boy, my mother and I would peer into a viewfinder and gaze at images of distant places, natural landscapes from around the world—Japan and Mexico, illuminated caves and deserts, a whole menagerie of animals. But it seemed as if the only people I knew that had travelled away from Bogalusa were those individuals who had been in war.

  Years later, when I entered the US Army stationed in Chu Lai with the Americal Division, I fully understood war was indeed a life and death matter. However, what began to visit me were echoes of Southern religious culture. Thou Shalt Not Kill. And yet there was also a sense of belonging to a fraternal order, to a symbolic community; to be a full-fledged American, this is expected. Perhaps this need to be fully initiated was even cultural or racial.

  But whatever one witnessed in battle became a silence carried within. Soldiers are always dreaming themselves into the future as a way of getting beyond this, of moving forward. As a man, I sometimes think back to the fragments of Uncle Jesse’s experience, and I realize that those closest are left merely to imagination as a means of understanding.

  After I returned from Vietnam, Uncle Jesse took the .38 from under his suit coat, placed it on the white handkerchief, and he and his sister knew it would be the last time they’d go through their ritual. He had been diagnosed with incurable lung cancer, and he had returned to my grandmother’s to die. That was love and duty, but she wouldn’t buy him any cheap wine or fifths of whiskey. What he witnessed in war still defined him. He still talked in his sleep, and in retrospect I believe his graphic details were an antiwar statement. Also, he spoke of a daughter in France, and this was news to his sister.

  Mama Mary called me one day.

  “He’s worrying me to death, begging for whiskey,” she said. “He knows he can’t drink under my roof.”

  A long, agonizing silence hung between us.

  “Son, what do you think?”

  “Mama, give Uncle Jesse the Old Crow.”

  “I knew you’d know what to do—all this war business.”

  Whenever I travel back across the years, it has become a balm—even with my acute memory of his psychic pain—to remember Uncle Jesse, his pocketsful of silver dimes for children in the neighborhood, and his ritual of refuge in his sister’s house.

  Yet I hadn’t found my own refuge. I didn’t wish anyone to know I had served in Vietnam. I wanted to forget that time, even in a cultural landscape where the institution of war was so apparent. But the echoes of war can traverse or circumnavigate borders of the mind and flesh.

  Now, as I read through the works in this collection, I think back to 1990, to when I journeyed back to Vietnam. Kevin Bowen had called me from the William Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social Consequences at the University of Massachusetts in Boston and said, “Yusef, do you want to go back to Vietnam for a visit?” It wasn’t something I had to think about. “When?” I asked.

  I arrived in Bangkok two days behind schedule, after three or four detours on Northwest Airlines, my luggage lost, but I hadn’t thrown my hands up and said, “To hell with this.” The others had taken bets if I’d abort my trip. I flew to Vietnam early the next morning with poets and writers Kevin Bowen, Philip Caputo, W. D. Ehrhart, Larry Heinemann, David Hunt, Larry Rottmann, and Bruce Weigl. We were headed to Hanoi for a conference with members of the Vietnamese Writers’ Union.

  It had been 20 years, and I never dreamt of walking the streets of Hanoi. My mind played back images of my childhood friend Andrew Johnson who had been killed. I didn’t know how it would feel to be there, or how I, once “the enemy,” would be received. Still, the day before I traveled, a dud ammunition fired years earlier exploded when struck by a farmer’s plow in a rice paddy, maiming him and his three children. And yet, the Vietnamese welcomed us and we engaged in a dialogue. We listened to their stories and they listened to ours.

  After one of our joint sessions, I introduced myself to Nguy Nga, a local short story writer, and asked, “If you could do something you never did before, what would it be?”

  I don’t know where the question came from.

  “Teenager,” he said.

  “Huh?”

  “I never been a teenager.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  It was a punch in the gut.

  I had survived by contrasting my teenage years—swimming in the creek, fishing, fighting and making up, dreaming of distant places, kissing among the trees—with adult realities. I still can’t imagine not having been a teenager.

  Today, I have no doubt that—across time and place—we soldiers have carried home echoes of our war. Yes, we carry with us the pathos, and our loved ones often inherit the caustic baggage. Some spend a lifetime attempting to make sense out of the distant, protracted silence and detachment where bridges seldom exist. Inheriting the War, however, is a poignant anthology that connects voices from the next generation that traverse numerous borders. This compendium of experiences and impressions is a lived forum of feelings. It is also a conduit that moves toward understanding, to a place of negotiation through simple speech. All the “search and destroy missions” have been left behind, and a new territory of reconciliation emerges on the horizon. Inheriting the War brings people together; voices speak to each other. And, in this sense, a natural pragmatism is the underpinning of this anthology where each poem, short story, excerpt of fiction and nonfiction, serves as a bridge in psychological time and space. This is the stuff of supreme caring. Sometimes, when we speak of ourselves we are also telling each other’s stories.

  Perhaps the closing paragraph of Neil L. Jamieson’s Understanding Vietnam aligns with the task th
is anthology accomplishes:

  Americans or Vietnamese of all political persuasions and all generations and all walks of life must work to expand the sense of “we” and diminish the sense of “they.” If we cannot humanize those whose destinies have impinged upon our own, if we cannot increase empathy and vanquish self-righteousness, if we cannot expand our moral imaginations to discern and accept the pattern that connects us all in a common human condition, then we shall all continue to have lost the war in Vietnam. . . .

  What Jamieson says about armies and nations, this anthology says about loved ones—fathers, mothers, wives, and children. The chronicles of proverbial silence, along with exile, dislocation, unrequited rage, alcoholism and drug addiction, PTS, Agent Orange, it is all addressed here. These pages underscore a needful, unselfish dialogue. Sometimes spoken through crafted metaphor, sometimes straight on, each unique work in Inheriting the War embraces a collective that aims to engage through some daring and passionate truths calibrated by bravery.

  THE LOST PILOT

  For my father, 1922–1944

  Your face did not rot

  like the others—the co-pilot,

  for example, I saw him

  yesterday. His face is corn-

  mush: his wife and daughter,

  the poor ignorant people, stare

  as if he will compose soon.

  He was more wronged than Job.

  But your face did not rot

  like the others—it grew dark,

  and hard like ebony;

  the features progressed in their

  distinction. If I could cajole

  you to come back for an evening,

  down from your compulsive

  orbiting, I would touch you,

  read your face as Dallas,

  your hoodlum gunner, now,

  with the blistered eyes, reads

  his braille editions. I would

  touch your face as a disinterested

  scholar touches an original page.

  However frightening, I would