Among the
Americans arriving in Vietnam in the weeks that followed, a time known as the
Tet Offensive, was a young Marine and future poet, R.L. Barth. His brother
recently found two poems Bob wrote in the late 1970’s “which I had not only
lost but had completely disremembered having written.” He has published them in
Thirteen Months (Epigrammist Press, 2019) a pamphlet that includes,
in addition, five epigrams devoted to the war. The title refers to the length
of Bob’s tour in Vietnam. The first of the salvaged poems, “Letter from a
Staging Area,” is subtitled “arriving
in-country, February 1968,” and includes these lines:
“But there I was:
Asleep one
minute, stumbling to war the next.
Suspended in
impacted time,
I waited,
hearing all too sharply
The thump
and crash, the pings as smaller pieces
Of shrapnel
hit tin bulkheads. What was it like?
Like
suddenly the true Platonic forms
Shredded the
shadows?”
Here is the
other recovered poem, “A Letter from the World,” subtitled “March 1969”:
“You’ll
never come in from your last patrol.
Down to six
spades—your short-time calendar—
You count
long rations left, each fighting hole,
Certain you
know exactly where you are
“When your reflections
snap from dwindling days
To clean
clothes, women, loafing, and cold beer.
And yet that
reverie indulged betrays
The horrors
you contain; and once back here,
“As you’ll
discover, you must sleep at night,
Walking one
more patrol; relearn, in bed,
Paddies,
jungle, fear, till with the first light
You’re oily
with the rancor of the dead.”
On the front
of the chapbook Bob has written:
"Patrick,
here’s a
small group of poems I put
together to ‘celebrate,’
or at least
to
acknowledge, the 50th anniversary
of my
departure from the RVN
Bob
14 iii, ’19”
[The lines
quoted at the top are from Vietnam: An
Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975 (2018) by Max Hastings.]
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