Inheriting the War Page 22
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
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.