'War’s War'

“A soldier's time is passed in distress and danger, or in idleness and corruption.” 

Forty years ago I knew a firefighter in a small Ohio city who had served in Vietnam as a “tunnel rat.” He was the smallest man in the department, built like a jockey, and the angriest. He was loud, impressively obscene in speech and forever complaining about the city administration and the fire chief (who once, in confidence, told me he called Bill “Mad Dog”). His job in Vietnam was to enter and destroy underground tunnels built by the Viet Cong – a nightmarish assignment. In an off-the-record conversation, Bill told me that being a firefighter was sometimes like being a tunnel rat – long stretches of tedium in the fire station punctuated by moments of impossible terror. It was the only time I ever heard him reflect on his military service or speak thoughtfully about anything. I took his class and he certified me in CPR.

 

The passage quoted above is from Dr. Johnson, as recounted by Boswell. Johnson never served in the military but in the same passage from 1778, Boswell tells us his friend “always exalted the profession of a soldier.” R.L. Barth took the title of his 1988 collection A Soldier’s Time, Vietnam War Poems from Johnson’s observation and used the sentence as his epigraph. In 1968-69, Bob was a Marine serving as a patrol leader in the 1st Reconnaissance Battalion in Vietnam. His poems are virtually the only ones to come out of that war worth reading. Bob is a student of war, his and others’. He has written extensively about the earlier war in Vietnam, the one that culminated in the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. He often acknowledges a kinship with soldiers from other ages, as in “A Letter to the Dead”:  

 

“The outpost trench is deep with mud tonight.

Cold with the mountain winds and two weeks’ rain,

I watch the concertina. The starlight-

Scope hums, and rats assault the bunkers again.

 

“You watch with me: Owen, Blunden, Sassoon.

Through sentry duty, everything you meant

Thickens to fear of nights without a moon.

War’s war. We are, my friends, no different.”

 

Bob’s most readily available book is probably Deeply Dug In (University of New Mexico Press, 2003). In his introductory poem, “Reading The Iliad,” he juxtaposes Vietnam and an earlier war:

 

“Volume and desk, coffee and cigarette

Forgotten, the reader, held in Homer’s mind,

Looks on both Greeks and Trojans fighting yet

And heroes and foot-soldiers, thin and blind,

 

“Forced-marching for the Styx. But suddenly

Stunned by the clamor under smoky skies,

Boastings and tauntings, he looks up to see?

Not the god-harried plain where Hector tries

 

“His destiny, not the room--but a mountain

Covered with jungle; on one slope, a chateau

With garden, courtyard, a rococo fountain,

And, faces down, hands tied, six bodies in a row.”