'Music Mimicked the Exploding Ordnance'

Americans have reduced the war in Vietnam almost exclusively to late-Sixties rock music and dope, rather than Robert McNamara and the Tet Offensive. Their sources are Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket. In a population of compromised literacy that relies on pop culture for what little it knows of history, this is hardly surprising. A war that claimed hundreds of thousands of American and Vietnamese lives is a video clip, a Boomer reverie. 

The poet laureate of that war, virtually the only American poet who has written about it with intelligence, technical skill and honesty, and strictly from the enlisted man’s point of view, is R.L. Barth. In 1968-69 he was a Marine serving as a patrol leader in the 1st Reconnaissance Battalion. The war is almost his exclusive subject as the titles of his books suggest: Deeply Dug In, Forced-Marching to the Styx: Vietnam War Poems, Small Arms Fire, Learning War. Over the weekend Bob sent me a new poem preceded by an epigraph attributed to “an anon. L/Cpl.”: “Hell, yes, we’re cynical. We’re here to do a job. So do it. / All the flag-waving and home thoughts are bullshit.” Here is “In from Patrol”:

 

“Armed Forces Radio was, mostly, off limits.

We didn’t give a damn for ‘A Date with Chris’

Nor for her All-American girl charm:

Non-musical equivalents of the dreck—

Think, Gary Puckett and the Union Gap—

That filled the airwaves. I recall but one

Song that we’d stop and crank the volume for:

The Hugo Montenegro version of

‘The Good, the Bad, the Ugly’ with Bob Setzer

Singing his own recon-specific lyrics.

We counted on the music sent from home,

The Jimi Hendrix tapes, The Who, Blue Cheer.

If heavy metal had existed then,

We’d all have been head-bangers, metal heads

Whose music mimicked the exploding ordnance

And death squeals of the carnage all around us.”

 

More pop culture than is customary in Bob’s work, but the focus remains not on the music but on the Marines and what they chose to do with it. Bob adds a helpful footnote:

 

“Anyway, the only reference in the poem you might not know is 'A Date with Chris.' Armed Forces Radio had a program hosted/dj-ed by the model and starlet Chris Noel. My reference to it in my terms would earn me the same kind of abuse from a number of veterans that I have received for trashing Bob Hope, John Wayne, and Martha Raye. Call them veterans without a healthy cynicism or needing (so they would say) a morale boost. No morale boost was needed if you simply did your job to the best of your ability.”

 

From  a civilian point of view, I always thought of Gary Puckett’s music as a soundtrack for pedophiles. Nice to see the Marines appreciated Ennio Morricone’s masterpiece. I worked for a newspaper in Indiana where the chief photographer was a Vietnam veteran. Steve told me he associated three songs with his tour: Hendrix’s “Purple Haze,” Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Proud Mary” and the Animals’ “We Gotta Get Out of This Place.”