'And For It Does So Dearly Pay'

Some wartime casualties are time-released. Death is deferred. In his new collection, That Mad Game (Scienter Press, 2025), R.L. Barth devotes three poems to a civilian, the war correspondent Albert W. Vinson, who wrote about him leading a patrol of Marines in Vietnam in 1968. The briefest appears in a section Bob calls “Snowfall in Vietnam: Poems/Maxims,” and is titled “Stringers: i.m. A.W. Vinson”: “The newsmen with guts.” Bob is extending the logic of his devotion to concision and composing a poem of four words. 

Vinson wrote a story about Barth’s patrol that was published on the Week End Feature Page of the Cincinnati Post & Times Star on November 16, 1968. Barth was from Erlanger, Ky., across the Ohio River from Cincinnati, and the story made him briefly a hometown hero. Vinson had served as a Marine during World War II and was seriously wounded by Japanese machine-gun fire. Only last year did Bob learn that Vinson had committed suicide in 1971. Bob includes “In the Mountains,” a three-poem sequence “in memory of Albert W. Vinson, who first placed these events on the record.” Finally comes “2^nd Lt. Albert W. Vinson, U.S.M.C.,” subtitled “Talasea, New Britain 1944—Ononomowoc, WI 1971”:

 

“Those Japanese machinegun rounds

That shattered shoulder, legs, and arms

Killed you as surely as, years later,

The freight train on that lonely night.”

 

Barth’s subject is not the history of the war in Vietnam. Rather, his focus is the impact that war had on the lives of young men born into safe, prosperous postwar America and thrown into a barbarous conflict without a coherent strategy, goal or widespread support at home. In his introduction to Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975 (2018), Max Hastings writes “All wars are different, and yet the same.” In a section of his new collection titled “Coda: World Wars,” Bob includes poems dedicated to men who fought in previous wars. His is a poetry of remembrance, often across generations and centuries. Here 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.”

 

Bob asked me to write a blurb for That Mad Game. It appears on the back cover:

 

“Bob Barth has said he could talk to a Roman legionary – a fellow warrior. His poems are compact, artfully crafted, unsentimental and mindful of earlier soldier-poets. They are the shoptalk of a fighting man, a Marine patrol leader in Vietnam. He takes his title – ‘War, that mad game the world so loves to play’ -- from Jonathan Swift, who reminds us of those who ‘so dearly pay.’”

 

Bob’s title is from Swift’s “Ode to Sir William Temple” (c. 1692):

 

“War, that mad game the world so loves to play,

      And for it does so dearly pay;

For, though with loss, or victory, a while

      Fortune the gamesters does beguile,

Yet at the last the box sweeps all away.”

 

Ours is a literary age in which most poems are stridently trivial and frequently incoherent. Bob writes with technical mastery of consequential things. Here is “Doughboys: Photograph c. 1917,” 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.”