Inheriting the War Read online

  THE THINGS THEY CARRIED THAT WE CARRY

  When I was five, the Vietnam War officially ended. In some sense, though, wars never really end—not for those cauterized by their fire. Forty years later, my father, who served as a U.S. naval advisor on a South Vietnamese patrol gunboat and survived the Tet Offensive holed up in the Saigon hotel, would visit Vietnam with fellow veterans, and was stunned to see that his Vietnam no longer existed. The Saigon of 1968 was gone, except for the one he carried in his head, suffusing his body, flaring out into our family room at moments of helplessness and despair.

  A few years back, talking to my students in “Literature of War and Peace,” my father surprised me when he said the best thing he did in Vietnam was volunteer at a Catholic orphanage, teaching English. When he asked the head of the orphanage, Sister Regina—who’d been airlifted out before the fall of Saigon—what he could do, she suggested sponsoring a refugee family. Despite having two small children, he and my mother agreed.

  I have a blurry memory of an endless expanse of tents, stretching into the distance. Camp Pendleton, California. What was promised to be a family of five had now bloomed into fourteen. The Nguyen family stood outside a dusty tent, awaiting a life they could not imagine. They’d lost everything but the clothes on their bodies, and Hoa, the matriarch, had her four children and old mother hold onto a string as they walked in the camps in Guam and Philippines, so they wouldn’t get separated.

  I would share my room with Lam and Dủng—boys a few years older than me—while my parents would battle landlords reluctant to rent to foreigners. I remember, more than anything, the Nguyens’ kindness and generosity, the appealing scents of their houses.

  Thirty years later, when we visit the Nguyen family, Ba tells the story of how we became one family. He does not hold back his tears—tears of gratitude, tears of sorrow—as memories of that war flood back. Hoa played with our three-year-old daughter as if she were her own. They have lived out classic immigrant narrative—all their children successful professionals—yet they carry with them where they came from. Big heart, Ba said, your parents have big heart. When he said heart, it sounded like hurt. His eyes shined. We tell you this, Hoa said, so that you can help someone also.

  War always comes home. In Great-uncle Charlie, who spent his entire adult life in an asylum when he returned from the Great War, though his siblings were told that he was dead. In the anger and grief of my veteran father. In the men who wept behind dark sunglasses as my father pinned medals onto their worn fatigues during the 1986 Vietnam Veteran parade in Chicago—the first parade for Vietnam Veterans, over ten years after the war was over. In the scars in the skull of my Palestinian ex-brother-in-law. In the paranoid gaze that a woman gave me on an international flight after 9/11, as I, a somewhat swarthy Arab American, slowly removed my shoes.

  Writing, for me, has been a practice pitched against the forces of war—the dislocation, trauma, and pain that trail in their wake. As Herodotus once wrote, I write to “prevent these deeds from drifting into oblivion,” striving not only to chronicle what has happened, but also to carve out the contours of a better world. Naomi Shihab Nye articulated this paradoxical vision of hope in “Jerusalem”: “it’s late but everything comes next.”

  In the past decade, I have been inexorably drawn to writing about the depredations in the Middle East. “Hung Lyres” is a sequence of poems from Sand Opera (2015), a book-length meditation on the post 9/11 years. What began as outrage, as testimony, as grief, morphed into a keen-song of survival, watching my children surprise me back into joy. Witness without love is like death without life. I write to work our way back toward what Rumi called “the field”—that place of the imagination, beyond the realm of good and evil.

  FROM HUNG LYRES

  @

  When the bombs fell, she could barely raise

  her pendulous head, wept shrapnel

  until her mother capped the fire

  with her breast. She teetered

  on the highwire of herself. She

  lay down & the armies retreated, never

  showing their backs. When she unlatched

  from the breast, the planes took off again.

  Stubborn stars refused to fall . . .

  @

  Downstairs, the baby monitor opened its one-way channel

  to the fitful breathing. My brother-in-law uncorked a bottle,

  doled out the steak and silver. On TV: a portrait of a marine,

  dress blues. His eyes still open. At the Vietnam Veteran

  parade, Chicago ’86, I saw sideburned men bivouacked

  behind shades, awkward as my father pinned stacks

  of ribbons to unbuttoned fatigues, still returning from the war

  ten years later. What I remember, Rob said, was John. Every dinner

  his father rehearsed the arguments: containment, the Reds. He stewed

  in silence. Until, once, he grabbed his father, pulled him to the backyard.

  We’d reached the bottom of the bottle. He took a kitchen knife

  and gouged the dirt. Rob looked at the well of glass, its last smutch

  of red. I’m underwater, looking up at a milky light.

  Inside the box was a necklace of ears. The son said: this is your war.

  Did it happen that way, the circle of ears—a symbol so readymade

  it’s already fiction? The scholar teaching “The Dream of the Rood”

  declares: any time a poet repeats himself, he really means it.

  I have my doubts. Still: inside the box was a necklace of ears.

  Above us, someone stirred, the monitor chirring.

  We held our breath. No one was crying.

  @

  What does it mean, I say. She says, it means

  to be quiet, just by yourself. She says, there’s

  a treasure chest. Inside. You get to dig it out.

  Somehow, it’s spring. Says, will it always

  rain? In some countries, I say, they are

  praying for rain. She asks, why do birds sing?

  In the dream, my notebook dipped in water,

  all the writing lost. Says, read the story again.

  But which one? That which diverts the mind

  is poetry. Says, you know those planes

  that hit those buildings? Asks, why do birds sing?

  When the storm ends, she stops, holds her hands

  together, closes her eyes. What are you doing?

  I’m praying for the dead worms. Says, listen:

  MỘNG-LAN , writer, former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, Fulbright Scholar, has published six books of poetry and artwork and two chapbooks, and has won prizes such as the Juniper Prize, the Pushcart Prize, and the Great Lakes Colleges Association’s New Writers Awards, among others. Frequently anthologized, including in Best American Poetry Anthology, she has finished a novel, with an excerpt in the North American Review. A former college professor with an MFA in creative writing from the University of Arizona, she left her native Vietnam on the last day of the evacuation of Saigon. Also a musician, composer, visual artist, and dancer, she has released nine albums of jazz piano and tangos, which showcase her poetry. Her new show is “Ocean of Senses: Dream Songs & Tangos: one woman’s journey from Sài Gòn to Buenos Aires via America.”

  FIELD

  Crows land like horses’ neighs

  rush of rocks

  how many buffaloes

  does it take to plow a disaster?

  how many women to clean

  up the mess?

  shoots of incense

  hotly in her hands

  she bows towards the tombstones

  face of her son

  how many revolutions for us to realize?

  her windless grey hair

  becomes hershe knows this

  there is no reason

  to dye what she’s earned

  rain quiet as wings

  on her back

  A NEW VIỆT NAM
r />   1

  sweat of bolts & nails

  muscle like steel & metal

  architects’ work at a ripping pitch

  pounding out a new capitol

  around the lakes

  morning to eveningthe ground explodes

  liquid concrete

  mercury ambling down streets

  you think you are the noise

  men pick at French-laid concrete like crows

  shovels and picks at shoulders

  they standknees in earth

  pain trots down the street

  how life would’ve beenmore than noise

  how events should’ve happened

  2

  Huế—what do you make of chance

  life’s but a dollar a day

  what should you say when a person

  dies each day in the Demilitarized Zonescrounging for scrap metal

  shrapnelunexploded

  bullets & bombs on trays like shrimp

  before tourists?

  the hillsnow therenow disappearing

  white claws stream downfrom dumped chemicals

  a fun house of horror

  still after decades the Khe Sanh Combat Base

  is nearly flat; the Hôˋ Chí Minh trail winds

  thirty minutes to Laos, & National Highway 1 threading

  the country in one

  is it chance that the Huế dialect is a giddy

  fish never to be hooked?

  the language is imagined by the land’s vapors

  fluctuating hills

  the mirage of white sand

  by dreams of the brood

  of cows walking through white mountains

  a woman fries her smoky meal

  next to a moon crater

  3

  honey-moon light swoops over the valleys

  upon the Dà Lạt mountains

  like squadrons

  a man buys two bunches of bananas in half a second

  I linger& face the remark

  of the vendor“chúi nào cũng nhủ vậy hết

  cô hiền quá đi vào buôn bán đi”

  (“the bananas are all the sameyou’re too naivego into business”)

  I pass the Nuclear Research Center

  prop from an old movie

  on a deserted mountain

  toward the Domaine de Marie Conventa pink

  church“once house to 300 nuns”someone waves

  then past the cemeterya mountain of crosses

  which doesn’t stop rising

  JUAN J. MORALES is the author of The Siren World and Friday and the Year That Followed. He is a CantoMundo Fellow, the Editor of Pilgrimage Magazine, and an Associate Professor of English at Colorado State University–Pueblo. He is the son of an Ecuadorian mother and Puerto Rican father, who spent 31 years in the US Military. His father is a two-time Purple Heart recipient who served in the Korean Conflict and completed two tours during the Vietnam Conflict. Morales writes to preserve the conflicted perspective on the soldier’s experience and its mixture of sacrifice, opportunity, and the lasting impact of PTSD on his father and family.

  THE CLOVERLEAF

  The day Pop gets shot, he follows every order and procedure. He repeats prayers, reads letters from home twice, cleans his gun. His lieutenant tells him to use the Cloverleaf with five men to sweep the next mile, to move the unit up. They stem up, make three-circled sweeps. Pop counts steps, ending one leaf at the start of the next. Then, on their last loop, automatic fire traps them, echoes in their helmets, a sound hot as splintered tree bark. They take cover near the hole the V.C. stops digging when he hears Pop’s patrol.

  Bullets rip through air and leaves. Pop doesn’t see his wound until the radioman points to where bullet cleaves past ligaments, bone, and slides through his shoulder. The tiny slit drips until his sleeve soaks dark green. Bullshit, he yells, shooting on an emptied clip. They regroup after Kennedy flanks the V.C. Even Pop shakes his head and looks away when Kennedy cusses at the corpse. When they withdraw, Pop leans on McDaniels.

  At base camp, pain scrapes into Pop’s thoughts. Violet smoke swirls then fizzles upward with the voices lost in the propellers. A medic lays him on the gurney, bandages him up. When the helicopter takes off, McDaniels and the big black man, whose name Pop forgets, waves. Before he loses them behind the tree line, Pop watches both relax, light cigarettes, and study the grass folded under their boots. He wonders if they’ll be alive when he comes back. The helicopter is cold. He ignores the landscape, the lucky gash beginning to scar his shoulder.

  PHOBIAS

  You rub your hands together and shiver when you tell me the story.

  In Panama, every soldier in your unit builds rafts out of branches,

  weaves of grass, and ponchos. One at a time,

  everyone moves across the Chagres. Your raft, near the center

  of the murky current, unravels. Under your breath and river’s grinding,

  you feel something like leeches seep into your clothing

  and fill your boots. The young soldier, you call him strong swimmer,

  tucks the damp rope in his mouth to drag you

  and the remaining bits of raft. Seeing through waves

  lapping in my eyes, I imagine myself hearing the silence

  then rush of the Chagres, and the kicking ache of my legs struggling

  to float. My arms extend, then spear us forward. I know you cannot swim,

  but the way you tell the story, of how you nearly drowned

  without getting your hair wet, makes me taste river froth

  spitting down my chin, and see the bank becoming bigger and bigger.

  After the river devours your hat, the rope braids

  into itself and jerks in your hands. You close your eyes

  to feel him kick his legs through the current.

  JOHN MURILLO is the author of the poetry collection Up Jump the Boogie, finalist for both the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the Pen Open Book Award. His honors include the J. Howard and Barbara M. J. Wood Prize from the Poetry Foundation, a Pushcart Prize, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Times, Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Cave Canem Foundation, and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. He has taught in the creative writing programs at Cornell University, the University of Miami, Columbia College Chicago, and currently teaches at Hampshire College and New York University.

  TROUBLE MAN

  It’s the bone of a question

  Caught in your throat,

  Pre-dawn sighs of the day’s

  First traffic, shoulders like

  Fists under your skin. Say

  it’s raining this morning,

  You’ve just left a woman’s

  Blue musk and duvet,

  To find devil knows what

  In the world, your wet collar,

  Too thin jacket, no match

  For pissed off sky gods,

  And say this car pulls near,

  Plastic bag for passenger

  Side window, trading rain

  For music. Marvin Gaye.

  And maybe you know

  This song. How long

  Since a man you called father

  Troubled the hi-fi, smoldering

  Newport in hand, and ran

  This record under a needle.

  How long since a man’s

  Broken falsetto colored

  Every hour indigo. Years

  Since he drifted, dreaming

  Into rice fields, stammered

  Cracked Vietcong, gunboats

  And helicopters swirling

  In his head. Years since

  His own long walks, silent

  Returns, and Marvin’s

  Many voices his only salve.

  He came up harder than

  You know, your father.

  Didn’t make it by the rules.

  You father came up hard,

  Didn�
��t get to make no rules.

  Graying beard, callused hands,

  Fingernails thick as nickels,

  You were the boy who became

  That man, without meaning

  To, and know: A man’s

  Life is never measured

  In beats, but beat-downs,

  Not line breaks, just breaks.

  You hear Marvin fade down

  The avenue and it caresses you

  Like a brick: You father,

  Marvin, and men like them,

  Have already moaned every

  Book you will ever write.

  This you know, baby. This

  You know.

  NGÔ TỰ LẬP , son of a People’s Army colonel, was born in 1962 in Hanoi and spent his childhood in the countryside during the Vietnam War. He has published three collections of poetry, five books of fiction, six books of essays, and many translations from Russian, French, and English. He has won seven prizes for his writing, which has been translated into English, French, German, Swedish, Czech, and Thai. He is currently director of the International Francophone Institute (Hanoi). His book Black Stars (translated by Martha Collins and the author) was nominated for the PEN International Award in 2014.