Inheriting the War Read online

  According to the Department of Veterans Affairs, nightmares are 1 of 17 symptoms associated with Posttraumatic Stress Disorder. Also, “If you have been suffering from nightmares for more than 3 months, you are encouraged to contact a mental health professional . . . ” More than 3 months? How about more than 42 years? According to the International Association of the Study of Dreams, somewhere between 5–10% of adults suffer from nightmares on a monthly basis. In their descriptions of what causes nightmares, veterans are specifically mentioned. “Many people experience nightmares after they have suffered a traumatic event, such as surgery, the loss of a loved one, an assault or a severe accident. The nightmares of combat veterans fall into this category. The content of these nightmares is typically directly related to the traumatic event and the nightmares often occur over and over.” My mother says that B should come with a sign that reads, “This man should not sleep alone.”

  My grandmother believes that you have to eat something before you tell someone your dreams, or else they’ll come true. For my entire upbringing, my family members have rushed to the kitchen to shove something in their mouths before recounting a disturbing dream. Carl Jung said, “The dream is a little hidden door in the innermost and most secret recesses of the soul . . . ”

  The night before B shouted himself, and us, awake he was telling us about how, just two days after he left Vietnam, his Infantry Company was essentially wiped out. The man who replaced B as the RTO (Radio Telephone Operator, who carries a 25 pound radio on his back in addition to the 50 pound rucksack) was taken as a POW for six years. He was eventually released and he and B still talk.

  When I ask if B remembers what the dream was about he just looks at me, a stark look that means he won’t repeat it. “I guess you do,” I answer. We eat toast and watch the sun come up over the desert skyline.

  Two days later, in the Ontario airport, we are surrounded by service men and women in their fatigues. Most of them seem older than the age both Grandpa and B went to war. I like to think that that fact alone will better their chance for survival and mental health. Going through security, we both notice that their shoulder patches are 4th Division. And B points out the Second Lieutenant. She is a woman, a few years younger than me. She has the face of my best friend growing up. Her eyes are steeled and focused. I feel like I would trust her. I smile; she nods sternly. The group closest to me is headed to Fort Bragg and then to Iraq. Many of them are returning for their second tours.

  My mother, B, and I sit near the window and wait for the plane. We talk about my life in New York, laugh about the roadside chapel we saw off Highway 10 called Mystical Memories, and how good the grandparents seem after 67 years of marriage. The sun is bright off the tarmac. I watch my parents board and walk over to my gate near the majority of the soldiers. I listen to their stories, one is talking about his kids, another on the phone with the base. They seem strong and capable. It seems like there are millions of them when they board my plane.

  According to the U.S. Census Bureau there are 23.2 million veterans in the United States and growing. At the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs they offer this advice under, How Can I Help?: “Tell your loved one you want to listen and that you also understand if he or she doesn’t feel like talking.” Although B and I talk about everything, he will never tell me about the contents of his nightmares. And yes, I understand.

  When I get home, after a few days, I ask B if it’s okay if I write about him. I ask if he’d like to add anything. He does:

  The VN war was more worthless than most wars and I have, to say the least, mixed feelings about having fought in it. Once you’re in it, as an individual, you have an allegiance and responsibility to your fellow soldiers and I tried to live up to that responsibility. I was nineteen when I went to war, a lot older when I came back. Paul Fussell, historian/writer, says something to the effect of, “Those of us who have fought in combat know something about ourselves—and it’s not very nice.” I’d have to agree. My ability to go quickly to that cold place where it’s me or you still gives me pause. Aging hasn’t softened that, it’s just made me less able to deliver on it. I have always been disturbed by the romanticizing, the glorification of war. There’s nothing good about it, it’s kill or be killed. Nothing glorious. I don’t mean to suggest you think that there is. I suppose I just wish the seminal experience of my life, and I guess Grandpa’s too, had been something of beauty rather than destruction and grief.

  BRIAN MA was born in North Carolina to Vietnamese parents of Chinese descent. On both sides, family members have been executed or jailed by all warring parties. He is a graduate of the Creative Writing Program at New York University, and he currently lives and works in Seoul, Korea.

  JULY IN VIETNAM

  Only two generations before they spoke French

  and then Russian,

  and now the Soviet guns are still around.

  Dawns skinny soldier-boys march the square

  in this country where

  there is no snow, never snow,

  and no potatoes. I came for a reason

  but his prison is a school now,

  my family’s house a pharmacy.

  It is cramped, in the alleyways

  laundry hangs on strings.

  After eating I sweep the fish-heads

  from the table and cats take what they can.

  I have registered my name and address

  at the police station,

  changed my money at the jewelry store.

  Meeting the ex-prisoners was raucous,

  I ate snake and frog because I was drunk.

  We were all drunk

  and they were telling the waitress I was from America.

  My observations are rarely confident.

  Every now and then

  I get sick because of this air,

  heavy with particulates.

  They play music too loud in the clubs

  so that whenever I leave,

  I can’t even hear the motor-traffic.

  In this country the landscape loves

  apologizing to me and I love this generosity.

  Every day I eat the vegetables and fruit here,

  I eat the ice.

  AERIAL

  This military plane from an old war

  gutted then fit with seats

  carries me

  over jungles and swamps.

  The morning burns what fog it can.

  Did I look out the windows at first, I can’t remember.

  I thought I felt the hull-plates rattle

  against loose bolts.

  Flying homeward as though to a dying parent

  the propellers are so loud I feel them on my skin.

  Distances and blood.

  In coming here all threads snap,

  there’s no easy way back.

  The jungle breathes its dark mists,

  its incoherent stillness puts me on guard.

  As I descend the sun at my level

  makes me squint,

  my eyes drooped as though in arrogance.

  But as usual the boundaries are hard to discern.

  The guilt is like a fog; in the fog there are people.

  SJOHNNA McCRAY studied at Ohio University and earned an MFA from the University of Virginia where he was a Hoyns Fellow. McCray also received an MA in English Education from Teachers College, Columbia University. His poetry collection, Rapture, was selected by Tracy K. Smith as the winner of the 2015 Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets and was published by Graywolf Press in 2016. His honors include the AWP Intro Journal Award, Ohio University’s Emerson Poetry Prize, and a Pushcart Prize nomination.

  HOW TO MOVE

  I cannot look at anything

  so black as my father’s leg

  or used-to-be-leg below the knee

  now a stump. If a child’s doll lost

  its flexible hand, the surface

  underneath would be as round

  as father’s
stump. I’ve touched it once.

  And my brother, who is five,

  is not afraid to touch the stump.

  Men on the corner used to holler

  that dad was a high yellow nigger

  or if the sun had darkened him

  and pulled the red to the surface of his skin,

  a red nigger. I am thinking of colors

  because the prosthesis comes in colors.

  His first leg was the color of oatmeal,

  maybe the color of peaches. Khaki,

  yellow and pink: a simulated sunset.

  I am thinking of technicians

  with photographs creating

  perfect shades of negroness

  for limbless negroes, every negro

  matched to a swatch or chart with names

  like fingernail polish. When my brother

  touches the stump, the stump

  that has shrunk and hardened to look

  like an oversized, uncircumcised penis,

  when my brother takes the brown

  almost black debris of father’s life

  into small hands that marvel

  at catching spiders in jars, he is not afraid.

  When we discover death, shaking

  in the gravel driveway, he knows it

  immediately, the dark gray body

  of the robin, the red and slightly pink

  shaggy belly. The fuzz of the robin’s round belly

  like a fuzz of new tennis balls.

  The robin is on its side with the right wing

  moving slowly, back and forth.

  At the same time, the beak is opening

  And closing. There’s hardly any sound, no song

  except the sound of short, jagged gasps. All

  elements working in unison: wing

  moving back and forth, beak

  opening and closing, the rhythm inherent

  in knowing and not knowing when anything

  is coming, but wanting to finish it, gracefully.

  Even while dying. But maybe grace

  has nothing to do with it; maybe

  it’s desire that pulls our limbs, the robin’s

  wing on concrete, to fly even in shadow

  of a man and a boy, the boy with his eyes

  out of his mind, celestial. Maybe

  the desire is to show us how to move.

  When we are at home,

  my brother takes the stump in his arms

  holds on to it like a prize or an unexpected gift

  that father has given us.

  BEDTIME STORY #1

  —Seoul, Korea, 1971

  Father gave her a little extra. How could she not

  fall for him? He was handsome

  but still a boy. In the depot where soldiers

  took such women, his skinny body clung

  too close to hers and his narrow ass still

  belonged to his mother. The other men

  knew the routine and how much to pay.

  She loathed their accent and American swagger.

  The sweat would barely cool and dry

  before another shook the cot and bucked his hips

  out of rhythm—in some other time zone.

  However, he began to offer other things

  besides money. He brought sweets from the base

  and the minute he touched his pocket

  the face she reserved for his English crumbled

  like sweet toffee. Because he didn’t know how

  to say what he wanted to say, no time

  was spent on uneasiness. Chocolate

  caramel and peanuts spoke best, secured

  his place. He hooked his arms through hers as if

  they could stroll the lane like an ordinary couple:

  the unassuming black and the Korean whore

  in the middle of the Vietnam War.

  GARDNER McFALL lost her Navy pilot father in the Vietnam War when she was 14 years old; his A4-Skyhawk was never recovered from the Pacific, where he was training for a second tour of duty in Vietnam. Her first book of poems, The Pilot’s Daughter, was an elegy for him that subsequently became the basis for her libretto for the 2010 opera Amelia, commissioned by Seattle Opera. Russian Tortoise, her second poetry collection, contains a section of poems derived from her travel to Vietnam in 2006. McFall has received a “Discovery”/The Nation award, The Missouri Review’s Thomas McAfee Prize, and residencies to Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

  MISSING

  For years I lived with the thought

  of his return. I imagined he had ditched

  the plane and was living on a distant

  island, plotting his way back

  with a faithful guide; or, if

  he didn’t have a guide, he was sending

  up a flare in sight of an approaching ship.

  Perhaps, having reached an Asian capital,

  he was buying gifts for a reunion

  that would dwarf the ones before.

  He would have exotic stories to tell,

  though after a while, the stories

  didn’t matter or the gifts.

  One day I told myself, he is not coming

  home, though I had no evidence,

  no grave, nothing to say a prayer over.

  I knew he was flying among the starry

  plankton, detained forever.

  But telling myself this was as futile

  as when I found a picture of him

  sleeping in the ready room,

  hands folded across his chest,

  exhausted from the sortie he’d flown.

  His flight suit was still on,

  a jacket collapsed at his feet.

  I half thought I could reach out

  and wake him, as the unconscious

  touches the object of its desire

  and makes it live. I have kept

  all the doors open in my life

  so that he could walk in, unsure

  as I’ve been how to relinquish

  what is not there.

  ON THE LINE

  The line where you were,

  like the equator, divided the world

  in two. Whatever the latitude,

  the planes roared off the carrier.

  Their bombs fell vertically

  on target. In a letter, you wrote:

  “Each day we bomb the Ho Chi Minh Trail,

  they reconstruct it by night.

  We can’t win, but don’t quote me.”

  You were a kind man.

  You loved your family.

  For years I’ve tried to figure

  what you loved more—

  not the military life with tours of duty

  or the jungle war. You loved

  Duty itself, a word, an abstraction.

  Now our lines of communication

  are cut, except for your blood in me.

  These words, strange as your death,

  fall as on foreign villages,

  unpronounceable names,

  all lost on American ears.

  I am traveling fast, propelled

  by you, doing what I must,

  ready to answer for it.

  BLUE RAFT

  for my daughter

  The first month you floated in me

  at the beach of my childhood,

  the sun burned my shoulders.

  Black crows appeared

  among the sandpipers and gulls.

  The crows were the only darkness,

  out of place with their splayed crow feet,

  unable to run or dive like sea-birds.

  I watched them on the shore,

  donax in their sharp beaks.

  I couldn’t say whether theirs

  was a taste born of necessity or desire.

  One looked at me with its hard, berry eyes,

  and I looked back,

  each of us suspecting the other.

  Then, I to
ok the blue raft

  from summers before and went out

  beyond the waves to flutter-kick and drift.

  The ocean was smooth as a platter,

  strewn with stars.

  I wanted to drift for hours

  in forgetful peace,

  right into oblivion,

  with only the ocean to buoy me

  and no one in the houses to call me.

  The houses seemed very small

  and far away.

  When I drifted close to the shrimpers,

  a shrill whistle woke me.

  I was out too far.

  I started to paddle and kick.

  All the while I thought of you

  floating inside me.

  Out too far, out too far.

  At last I reached the point

  where waves swell,

  and a wave lifted the raft

  high, then down.

  The foam enveloped me

  the way it would when I’d ride

  on my father’s back,

  a knapsack, a small burden

  among salty pleasure.

  I skidded over the broken shells

  to ankle-deep water, and as I rose,

  taking the blue raft lightly under my arm,

  salt and sand clinging to me,

  I thought of how my father would say,

  lying on a raft in the Atlantic,

  “This is the life.” He was dead,

  but you were floating in me,

  and the crows, like some new part

  of myself, stood on the beach,

  exquisitely black, shining.

  PHILIP METRES was born on the Fourth of July. His father served as a naval officer during the Vietnam War, and in the mid-1970s, the family sponsored and hosted a Vietnamese refugee family in their home. Metres is the author of Pictures at an Exhibition (2016), Sand Opera (2015), I Burned at the Feast: Selected Poems of Arseny Tarkovsky (2015), To See the Earth (2008), and others. His work has garnered a Lannan fellowship, two NEAs, six Ohio Arts Council Grants, the Hunt Prize for Excellence in Journalism, Arts & Letters, the Beatrice Hawley Award, two Arab American Book Awards, a Watson Fellowship, a Creative Workforce Fellowship, the Cleveland Arts Prize, and a PEN/Heim Translation grant. He is professor of English at John Carroll University in Cleveland.