'There Will Be No One Left Who Knew Their Cost'

For the boys in the neighborhood, our primary occupation when chores were finished and the grownups were leaving us alone was “playing Army.” All of us had toy guns or at least sticks. Given our ages, when dividing into good guys and bad guys, the latter were always Germans and Japs. War was binary. The enemy was obvious and our cause was pure. We were enacting a sort of ancient ritual that required little moral reckoning. 

It was around 1964 when a Hungarian kid (d. 2010) a few years older than me suggested that we start fighting the Viet Cong. I had no idea what he was talking about. I didn’t follow the news. Why were these people worthy of our aggression? At least in our crowd, they never caught on, and I can’t speak for the next generation of boys. At least one of the guys in my gang was shipped to Vietnam a few years later. He survived. Another boyhood friend in another neighborhood was killed over there when I was a senior in high school. That war remained safely abstract for me.

 

In 1968-69, the poet R.L. Barth was a Marine serving as a patrol leader in the 1st Reconnaissance Battalion in Vietnam, and there was nothing abstract about his war. Bob this week sent me two poems he had written and printed for family members. The first, published in The Sewanee Review, is “Doughboys: Photograph c. 1917,” and is dedicated to Bob’s grandfather, Bernard Henry Benzinger (1894-1979), a World War I veteran:

 

“Around a folded blanket seven doughboys

Intently watch the dice turn six the hard way.

Like pre-noir tough guys, three or four clutch sawbucks

Half curled, ready to shell out or increase

A conscript private’s base pay. One, raffish,

Tilts his campaign hat like an old salt.

All seven would shame Bogart with the angle

Of dangling cigarettes and arched eyebrows.

But they're not tough guys, just heartbreakers all,

Stunning the viewer with impossible youth.”

 

Bob’s work is a poetry of remembrance, often across generations and centuries. The second poem is “Semper Fidelis: 1st MARDIV,” dedicated to Raymond Lawrence Barth (1921-2006), Bob’s father:

 

“A combat knife, web belt, some photographs,

Chevrons, dog tags, and medals: epitaphs

For both the recent dead and one to die.

While placing his mementos where mine lie

In the top dresser drawer, I contemplate

The tours of duty that they recreate:

Jungle terrain, twenty-six years apart,

Guadalcanal and I Corps, war’s grim art.

Their future dispensation? Surely lost.

There will be no one left who knew their cost.” 

 

The great Irish novelist John McGahern died on this date, March 30, in 2006 at age seventy-one. He never went to war but in a 2002 interview with the Guardian he said:

 

“I think that each of us inhabits a private world that others cannot see. The only difference between the writer and the reader is that the writer is able to dramatise that private world. But that private world, once it's dramatised, doesn't live again until it finds a reader. When I start to write, words have become physical presence. It was to see if I could bring that private world to life that found its first expression through reading. I really dislike the romantic notion of the artist.”