Last week I wrote a post about the poet Bob Barth, the patrol he led as a 21-year-old Marine Corporal in Vietnam, and the war correspondent who wrote a dispatch about him for a newspaper. Two days later, after learning that the stringer, Albert W. Vinson, soon took his own life, I wrote a second post recounting the wounds he had sustained as a young Marine in the Pacific. Among Bob’s recurrent themes is that all wars are one and all warriors are brothers of a sort. He makes the theme explicit “2nd Lt. Albert W. Vinson, USMC,” subtitled “Talasea, New Britain 1944”:
“Those
Japanese machine gun rounds
That
shattered shoulder, legs, and arms
Killed you
as surely as, years later,
The freight
train on that lonely night.”
The poem
reminds me of another written about an earlier war – Thomas Hardy’s “And There
Was a Great Calm” -- composed shortly after
the armistice went into effect on November 11, 1918. Soldiers, stunned by the
sudden silence, stare at the empty sky where artillery rounds had recently fallen:
“Breathless
they paused. Out there men raised their glance
To where had
stood those poplars lank and lopped,
As they had
raised it through the four years’ dance
Of Death in
the now familiar flats of France;
And
murmured, ‘Strange, this! How? All firing stopped?’”
For some,
the war never truly ended:
“Calm fell.
From Heaven distilled a clemency;
There was
peace on earth, and silence in the sky;
Some could,
some could not, shake off misery.”
2 comments:
Frank Sinatra had an uncle who was unable to live independently, as he was shell-shocked after World War I. He had to live with family for the rest of his life. He is now buried near Sinatra and Sinatra's parents.
I have long been an admirer of R.L. Barth's poetry and by the courage of his service in Vietnam. I concur with your assessment and that of other luminaries like the late great Helen Pinkerton that Bob is the greatest of our Vietnam War poets. Without question his poetry has accomplished objectives-expressed elsewhere- that his words about Vietnam would meet the test of ringing true to those who were there and allow those who were not, to experience the truth of what it was like to actually be there. And, he has done so with the finely honed, rare skill of the Stanford poets that came before him as fellow Stegner Fellows. Jack Kennedy
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