The Vietnam Reader (88 page)

Mr. Giai’s Poem
J
OHN
B
ALABAN
1991

Mr. Giai’s Poem

The French ships shelled Haiphong then took the port.
Mr. Giai was running down the road, mobilized
with two friends, looking for their unit in towns
where thatch and geese lay shattered on the roads
and smoke looped up from cratered yards. A swarm
of bullock carts and bicycles streamed against them
as trousered women strained with children, chickens,
charcoal, and rice towards Hanoi in the barrage lull.
Then, Giai said, they saw just stragglers.
Ahead, the horizon thumped with bombs.

At an empty inn they tried their luck
though the waiter said he’d nothing left.
“Just a coffee,” said Mr. Giai. “A sip
of whisky,” said one friend. “A cigarette,” the other.
Miraculously, these each appeared. Serene,
they sat a while, then went to fight.
Giai wrote a poem about that pause for
Ve Quoc Quan,
the Army paper. Critics found the piece bourgeois.

Forty years of combat now behind him
—Japanese, Americans, and French.
Wounded twice, deployed in jungles for nine years,
his son just killed in Cambodia,
Giai tells this tale to three Americans
each young enough to be his son
an ex-Marine once rocketed in Hue,
an Army grunt, mortared at Bong Son,
a c.o. hit by a stray of shrapnel,
all four now silent in the floating restaurant
rocking on moor-lines in the Saigon river.
Crabshells and beer bottles litter their table.
A rat runs a rafter overhead. A wave slaps by.
“That moment,” Giai adds, “was a little like now.”
They raise their glasses to the river’s amber light,
all four as quiet as if carved in ivory.

        13        
The Wall

1985. A veteran at the Vietnam Memorial.

Now a national shrine, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial at first aroused bitter controversy. In 1981, Yale architecture student Maya Lin’s winning design (the judges’ decision was unanimous) was called “a black ditch of shame,” and opposed vigorously by many in the Reagan administration, including James Webb. Though private money funded the construction, in a flurry of political dealing-much of it involving the government land and corporate funding for the Wall—Ross Perot’s contingent managed to get Jan Scruggs and the other founders of the Memorial to add the more heroic statue of the three grunts. It was fitting, cultural critics said, that even the memorial to this war would divide the country; literary critics noted the typical representational split between the figurative and the literal.

The dedication of the Wall in 1982 dispelled any controversy, as veterans and their relatives found the Memorial a powerful and apt remembrance of their friends and loved ones. Legends sprang up around the Wall, the most famous alleging that names carved in the black granite could be seen shedding tears. The Wall is now Washington’s most popular tourist destination, and thousands of Americans visit it each day, many leaving behind offerings for the war’s dead.

W. D. Ehrhart’s 1984 “The Invasion of Granada,” written on the occasion of the Reagan administration’s contemporary use of the military, opens up a different controversy, wondering what good the sudden acceptance of the veteran is without a similar understanding of
why the Vietnam War was wrong. Again, the veteran and what he or she represents has been forgotten; the symbol of the Wall, it seems, is easier to embrace than the real lessons of the war.

In the literature of Vietnam, as in life, the Wall has become a final destination for veterans and family members. The long journey to it—emotionally and physically—ends a great number of oral histories, memoirs, and novels. In my own
The Names of the Dead
(1996), medic Larry Markham takes his mentally disabled son Scott to the Wall, along with the offerings his veterans-outreach group has asked him to leave. Like many vets, Larry resists going to the Wall yet feels it’s necessary; he’s not sure how it’s going to hit him, if—like the stories his rap group tells and the memories he himself examines—it will help him or only hurt him more.
The Names of the Dead
is distinctive in that it’s the first Vietnam novel from a vet’s perspective written by a nonvet from the next generation.

Yusef Komunyakaa’s “Between Days” and “Facing It” from
Dien Cai Dau
(1988) concern memorials, the first a mother’s inability to give up her dead son, the second the poet’s own thoughts on seeing the Wall for the first time. In both, the power of hope and memory fuses the present with the past, the last generation to the next one. Unlike the casual visitor, the vet has to figure out what the Wall means and, symbolically, where he stands in relation to his memories of the war—trapped inside them, free to leave, or both.

The Invasion of Grenada
W. D. E
HRHART
1984

The Invasion of Grenada

I didn’t want a monument,
not even one as sober as that
vast black wall of broken lives.
I didn’t want a postage stamp.
I didn’t want a road beside the Delaware
River with a sign proclaiming:
“Vietnam Veterans Memorial Highway.”

What I wanted was a simple recognition
of the limits of our power as a nation
to inflict our will on others.
What I wanted was an understanding
that the world is neither black-and-white
nor ours.

What I wanted
was an end to monuments.

The Names of the Dead
S
TEWART
O’N
AN
1996

It wasn’t just the names. They wanted him to take pictures. They wanted him to leave things. Trayner gave him a boonie hat soft as a chamois, Mel White a pair of mirrored shades missing a stem. Meredith sent a pocket chess set, Sponge a plastic grass skirt. Larry wanted to take the ace and the pistol, but Clines needed them for evidence. He’d kept Larry’s name out of the paper. Creeley was a suicide, the wound self-inflicted, which was the truth. Larry emptied the trunk upstairs. He had Magoo’s pictures and Leonard Dawson’s cards in a bag in the back of Number 1, along with all of the ward’s stuff. His class A’s swung from a hanger in the empty racks.

He wasn’t carrying anything else. He’d checked the truck out before Marv got in, and now he was well south of Ithaca, tooling through the hills. In the passenger seat, Scott followed the arc of the wipers, cocking his head like a dog. Vicki had forbidden him to go, and Larry had to kidnap him out of class. He kept to the right lane, watched for cops in the grassy meridian, the islands of trees.

He’d thought of taking his father but he needed a few days to recuperate. Though the beating had left no visible scars, his body was thick with fluid, his knees and elbows swollen. Mrs. Railsbeck took a tray up to his bedroom. His father remembered Creeley saying something about his mother but exactly what he could honestly not recall. He thought Larry should have killed him but understood; maybe Larry was right. It was an argument for another time. Scott was a
better choice, Larry thought; his father already knew the price of war, the hardest lessons.

It was Wednesday, there was no one on the road, only muddy logging trucks, campers quilted with bumper stickers. They slowed for the little cities—Horseheads, Corning—moved through them anonymously, camouflaged, then turned south into the emptiness of central Pennsylvania. Peeling billboards stood in cornfields; churches advertised their sermons. Miles outside of Mansfield an adult bookstore beckoned to truckers, its front windowless, a heavy grille over the door. Blossburg came, and Covington—towns without stores, houses falling in on themselves,
SPEED CHECKED BY AIRCRAFT
, a sign claimed.

“I spy with my little eye,” Larry said, “something green.”

“Tree,” Scott guessed, and then it was his turn.

They used up the yellow line, the bridges, the other cars’ license plates. In the mountains the radio stations broke up. “Chances are,” Larry whistled. The truck labored up the long grades, the needle dipped toward empty. They coasted through the high hunting country, curving above the great reservoirs, the signs promising Williams-port. It cost him thirty dollars to fill up.

They stopped at a Friendly’s above Harrisburg for lunch. Larry checked his wallet, then helped Scott down and held his hand across the parking lot. The waitress gave Scott crayons in a cup and an E.T. placemat; she called him darlin’.

“Nothing for Dad?” she asked, and Larry smiled as if he had to resist her. A free sundae came with the meal; Larry helped him with it.

They got back in the truck and drove, the Susquehanna on their left, the low stone bridges and railroad tracks. Larry hoped for a train to show Scott, but when they caught up with one, he’d fallen asleep, his head bent forward, one eye vigilant, the other closed. Larry wedged his jacket under his chin, but a minute later it fell out. He hadn’t invited Vicki; now he wished she had come. She was better at planning things.

The rain grew worse as the day faded. South of York, traffic on the interstate stopped, a field of taillights. For half an hour they inched along, merging left. Ahead, a galaxy of police cars blocked the road,
their lightbars strobing over the pines. Trucks headed the other way slowed to see what was going on. Larry expected to be stopped and questioned, Scott pulled from the truck. Finally the file slid past an accident, a yellow Corvette broken over the guardrail, its fiberglass nose cracked. The EMTs were working over someone, their elbows jerking. He thought of the grip they’d taught him at Fort Sam, and for an instant, Salazar, then held himself back. If he started now, he wouldn’t stop. He wanted to leave everything there, dump it all in one spot like an Arc Light.

Scott slept through dinner. At the Maryland line, a trooper had a Mercedes on the berm, its owner walking a tightrope in the lights. High above a cloverleaf, a Sunoco sign hung in the black sky like a planet. Farther on, high magnesium stanchions bathed a major exchange the color of weak tea; the interstates poured into each other, widening, gaining strength. Semis whined past a few feet beside him, nose to tail like the cars of a train. It was eight, the professionals were out now, the nationwide lines—Roadway and Carolina, Consolidated Freightways, Red Ball Express. Signs for Virginia appeared, the traffic clotted, and the big rigs veered off, bypassing the Capitol.

On the outskirts, the motel rates tempted him, the truckstops and gas plazas. He didn’t know where he was going and he needed to fill up. His eyes burned and his back hurt and he was hungry, but he stayed in the middle lane, avoiding the on-ramps, pointing Number 1 for the city. The signs took him along the river, toward the Lincoln Memorial. He got off and stopped at a gas station, waking Scott.

“Home?” Scott guessed.

It was warmer here, the air rich with mud, as after a thaw. Larry got the pump started and walked to the lit office. The attendant wore a union suit, under it a sweatshirt with a hood. He was younger, his hair in cornrows; he kept a toothpick in one corner of his mouth but didn’t chew it. He unfurled a map on the counter but said nothing, and Larry had to ask.

“You mean the ditch,” the attendant said, and removed the toothpick. His finger lit on it immediately. “There you go. You won’t see nothing though.”

Larry bought the map and the attendant drew the route on it with a marker.

Larry had only seen Washington on TV, the protestors and limousines, the marble facades. He remembered the gaslamps from JFK’s cortège, the boots turned backwards in the stirrups. It was a disappointment to see it was a city. The corners bristled with convenience stores and panhandlers. Traffic rushed madly from light to light, buses cutting in front of him. He had the map folded into a square, pinning it to the wheel with one thumb.

On the way, they passed a McDonald’s. Scott was hungry.

“After,” Larry said, and he whined. Larry was trying to placate him when he saw the Washington Monument, the two warning lights on top blinking like eyes. He signaled and pulled to the curb.