Awards Celebration and Writing Workshop
Patrick Cole
from “The Draft”
“Vietnam!”
There it is. Vietnam.
We were now going to learn the meaning of this word. It would then have a
special power for us. Now when we heard it, instead of skating along on a
simple, literal, two-dimensional definition of it, we would automatically
feel a deeper, truer meaning. We can’t help it. We are children with this
word, when this word is in the air. We are children again, in touch.
You know how they say children are like sponges. They just soak everything
up. We soaked up Vietnam. Without even knowing we were doing it.
Vietnam is like a magic password, abracadabra hocus-pocus Vietnam! Saying it
or even just thinking it brings something into the world. It is immediate,
it is all there at once, it does not require thought, understanding. It is
the music of Chopin, it is about what it is. What it means can be explained
only to those who already understand it.
When we see the word Vietnam, the letters smile at us, that big capital V
like a grin, a sharpened tooth, Churchill’s chubby Victory, a confident, fat
smile wrapped all around in black. The word looks weird, it looks fun, there
is some kind of provocative invitation, an indulgence, a thrill, macabre
excitement. Vietnam—some kind of wildness, drama, importance.
It is one of those illicit words hidden—hiding—in one of the sections at the
back of the dictionary for little-used, exotic letters; the shunned, the
castigated, the strange, unplaceable, uncategorizable, unknown creatures
which exist and to which some of us are drawn, as if we know them, and they
us.
So odd, but eminently pronounceable, easier than American words –
V
et
nam
!
Vietnam—it attracts. It draws you in. You can never let go. Like coming
across a shining jewel in a patch of mud:
Mrrrrnnneoblleckrrghhhhahhmmmmphvietnamgrrrawwwwehhhoooonooomotherr...
Vietnam! He asked us what we knew about it. No one raised a hand. We knew
nothing about it. We were in the third grade; we had never encountered it.
By chance, but not surprisingly, no one in the class had a mommy or daddy
who had been there. So we were quiet. The boiler exhaled uneasily behind Mr.
Stuhby.
“Nothing,” he said, smiling. “Well, don’t feel bad.” We didn’t. “Until quite
recently, no one in this country knew anything about Vietnam.
Translated by John Balaban
A Tiny Bird
A tiny bird with red feathers,
a tiny bird with black beak
drinks up the lotus pond day by day.
Perhaps I must leave you.
The Outpost Soldier
Here are only cliffs and crags,
bird tracks, beasts shuffling, locusts chirring,
and jungle trees rustling their music.
A bird calls out from a gnarled tree.
I’ve lived in the forest for three years.
The Concubine
As second wife, I never liked the first,
who locks the door each night and climbs in bed
while I sleep on a mat outside.
At dawn she calls out, “Hey, Two, get up.
Slice potatoes and pound the beans.”
Potatoes. Beans. Because my parents were poor.
Lê Pham Lê
Simplicity
Exiled in this strange land
we build our tent-site on sand,
rocks soft to our work-hardened hands.
At night when the moon shines
we recite poems. The hammock sways.
A mother’s song lures her child to peace.
Beyond the monkey-bridge,
a boat rocks the waves.
Wind carry my worries
to the other side of the sea!
Britton Gildersleeve
from “39A Phàn dình Phùng”
I grew up in a house with bars on the windows. There were lizards on the
walls, and mosquito netting moved in quiet concert with the hum of ceiling
fans. I remember armed guards on my school bus. Servants who became such a
part of our family that my mother wrote to them for years. A black and white
dog who bit only the street boys who threw stones through the iron gates. My
youngest sister spoke French before English, Vietnamese before either.
Outside the second floor sunporch the shrubs were poinsettias planted by my
mother one Christmas. By the time we left they towered over the house.
When we first moved to Saigon it was still Indochina. In the interlude
between French occupation and American military build-up, there were only 50
“police advisors.” My father was one. But in 1960 French businessmen still
rode to work in cyclos, there were as many four-star restaurants as French
lycées, and almost no one foresaw body bags.
War came, but I remember frangipani. Climbing high into the twisted
branches, battling the ants for sweetly heady blossoms. My favorite tree
bloomed in the yard down the street. It belonged--does love entitle one to
ownership?—to Dr. McIntyre. My mother would go to visit, calling cards in
white-gloved hands, and while she sipped cool drinks I would climb into the
frangipani. The ants would trace their purposeful paths along the shiny bark
while I watched. They moved in quiet single file, precisely measured like
the increments on a ruler. If you put a leaf over their path, the ants
coalesced into small patrols, and the leader ants would pass back
information through coded movements of their tiny antennae.
It was a safe time. There were tanks clattering past the house’s iron gate,
and soldiers, and bombings at the movie theatre. But I remember getting up
early in the pre-dawn stillness, slipping down the stairs, and running in my
nightgown through the city’s empty streets with my dog. It was still dark.
You could smell the street waking up, damp and cool before the onslaught of
tropical heat. I thought I was flying, racing the dawn behind a black and
white dog. I was 10 years old.
The city streets were beautiful, lined with trees I’ve never found
elsewhere. They bore a miserable fruit which dropped into a curdled mess on
the driveway. I was allergic to it and broke out in a rash. But the trees
formed almost a tunnel over the pavement, shading the street before the
drive as if it were a boulevard in Paris.
Flowers grew everywhere. They lined Flower Street, stalls of glorious
exuberant color, strong and clear. The intoxicating plumeria, orchids,
banana trees, flame trees in yellow and red, and a fragile translucent white
flower I pressed between the pages of my Bible. Its perfect petals lie
behind my father’s scrawled inscription. Lizards bloomed on the walls like
more exotic flora. The prettiest ones—blue-headed, yellow-bellied and all
the rainbow in between—were poisonous, someone told me once.
Some days one of the servants—usually ChiBon—would take us to the zoo. The
infamous tiger cages: I remember only the tigers, how strong and feral they
were, pacing back and forth. And the yellow-bibbed bears on Bear Island,
waving to us from across their moat. If we had money we would buy sugar cane
to feed the elephants, watching their deft trunks loop around the stalks
held breathlessly in our outstretched hands, then slowly crunched, inch by
inch, into their triangular mouths.
I don't remember leaving. I remember only being gone. Returning to a world
where we didn’t belong: funny clothes, funny accents, and the sense of
global citizenship too natural to expatriate children. Years later, when
newspapers carried the news that Saigon was to be re-named Ho Chi Minh City,
I realized why the memory of leaving is so vague—I never left. Some part of
me remains, a young girl running in the streets of pre-war Saigon. . . .
Wayne Karlin
from “The Eye of the Nation”
Queues of jagged white rocks break through the soil here and there, the
spine, the people say, of the dragon that sleeps under the village,
protecting it. Vinh looks down at the cluster of thatched houses from the
hill, pans the Bolex over it, looking for a shot. What are wanted, he knows,
are not dragon bones but peasant-heroes with rifles slung over shoulders,
hands on plows; old women who have given all their sons and daughters to the
revolution, their faces carved to nobility by age and grief; young women
smiling as they squat and carve punji stakes to skewer the American invaders
or puppet troops. And so on. He is tired of all of it, too tired even to
think why he is tired. It isn’t that such people don’t move him, still,
after all these years. He’s seen the price they pay. He knows their
sincerity. A sharp, sour taste rises in his mouth. He’s been feeling
bilious, his stomach bloated. The villagers have fed them simply but well,
one old grandmother even finding some soybean milk sweetened with sugar for
him, a taste that brought him back to his childhood. But for weeks, before
coming here, he’d eaten with the soldiers, and the young girls in the Youth
Volunteer unit he’d been filming: nothing but manioc and tapioca from the
little fields they’d cultivated in the Truong Son Mountains, sometimes
nothing but roots. Maybe that’s all that was bothering him. His stomach. But
a vague image is flapping insistently in his mind, its very nebulousness
making him feel more ill at ease. It focuses into a flag being waved atop a
captured bunker, and then, yes, he does know what has been bothering him. He
hates doing reenactments. Prides himself on being there. He is the eye of
the nation, he’s been told, and has come to believe that those words
describe what he wishes to be. Too many of the other correspondents relied
only on reports, official communiqués, but he was always at the front, with
the people doing the killing and dying. Everyone knew his combat footage was
the best, only rarely re-staged. Yes. But it had been a significant victory
and he had not been notified until afterwards, when the soldiers had already
buried their comrades. So he’d gone to the scene, and placed the filthy,
weary men here and there, like arrangements in a composition. Told them to
run this way and that, as the sappers set off harmless explosions. There had
been a beautiful young private whom he’d placed on top the heap of bloody,
riddled sandbags in front of which so many had fallen, and he’d instructed
the boy to raise and wave the national flag triumphantly, though in the real
battle the commissar had forgotten or misplaced the flag. No matter. It was
all as formal and choreographed as a classic dance. He’d comforted himself
with the thought that at least the soldiers he’d used had actually been in
the fighting at that place. But then, weeks later, a sergeant had told him
that the beautiful private had been a coward who’d refused to advance,
pissed himself in terror. He told Vinh this as if the cameraman could take
back film once it was exposed, had the power to change a vision that met so
many needs, as if wasn’t too late to tell the truth. Now the image of that
boy had been seen in movie theatres in Hanoi and all over the North, and in
War Zone B, in the South also, flickering onto parachute silk backdrops set
up in caves and tunnels. Sanctified now and forever by his, Vinh’s, film.
Well, he thinks, and so what?
Gail Hosking Gilberg
On the Way to DaNang
On the hairpin turns of Hoi Van Pass
someone tells me there are no such things
as syllables in Vietnamese, and to be sure
to notice the leper colony over there
in the mountains above the South China Sea.
Nothing at all gives away the war, not
the endless varieties of green, the rice paddies
off to our right, or the windy pine trees
that might as well be California.
The marines arrived on Red Beach in 1965
and stayed until the end of the war,
somewhere north of Happy Valley and
GI Plateau. The only piece left the stone walls
of a PX and its foundation pillars like the forts
I created as a child outside my father’s army base
in Europe. A woman as old as the war
carries a pole with bags of bread hanging from
either end, her head topped with a cone-shaped hat,
her clothes the same black pajamas my father wore
sitting on our living room floor in southern Illinois.
Erin Murphy
My Father in Gray
gray like the carpet
in the black & white photo
where I’m an airplane
soaring on his feet
like the pencil lead
on the postal exam
that gives him extra points
for being a veteran
like the steamy jungle of
dreams he can’t remember
in the morning, the pills
he says he doesn’t need
the label on the vodka bottle
he keeps in the glovebox
gray like his only suit,
the one he wears
to every wedding and every
funeral, even his own
Judith Cody
Going Home
When enough time had elapsed
so that some of the soul
could be deposited back
into the coffer of the body
the body then cleansed, coiffured
contained in an unsullied
soldier suit, the old familiar
smile affixed to the sad face
the medals pinned upon the
anguished breast, only then
were the fathers
returned to their homes.
Barbara Presnell
Saturday night, your mother has a date
but you don’t. You sit on the blanket chest
behind the dressing table, watching her dab
concealer over shadows, rose blush
on olive cheeks, something blue across lids.
On her nightstand, the FM radio plays
the Eagles, fading in, fading out.
You want her to hurry up and go
so you can have a cigarette and then another
and another on the back porch steps,
get the six-pack from your cold car trunk,
finish the last half of joint you’ve been saving,
fall asleep in front of the TV, past
the National Anthem, when she won’t
be home, your mother,
who washes the gray from her hair
each month, can’t hold her wine,
cries by herself in the night. She’s in her bra
and panties, sliding hangers across
the metal closet rail, holding skirts and slacks
to her frame like paper doll clothes
when Paul McCartney breaks in—
You’d think that people would have had enough
of silly love songs. She sings along
in her tiny voice, her fleshless hips
bumping air, silky underwear flapping,
and you can’t help but get up
from the chest and do the descant
when Paul does, bumping your blue-jeaned
behind into hers. You raise your arms
like flamenco dancers, twirling from the vanity
to the telephone table and out the door
to the hallway, until, you don’t say it
but you know you are in this together,
and when the doorbell rings,
neither of you will be ready.
Susan Elbe
Before Desire
Men carry inside them the story we are never told,
of Adam just before sleep
in urgent discourse with God.
Desire came later, offered in the apple’s seeded star.
But first there was this desperate bargain
struck to cure the thing he could not name.
The last he saw—God’s hand coming at him sideways,
a fist of dream scorching his belly, the clean
snap of something torn from him forever.
Against this rough seam of loss, women are thin ribs
of light, knowing the way bones do, by ache
and prescience, how hard men try
to keep from us how much they wanted this.
Curiosity—a stitch in the side,
the first fever—before knowledge, before desire.