Dragonfly (pages 38-39)

At this juncture in Dragonfly, a poem about how war and military service were seen in 1980s America, as evidenced by a news story from 1987. Veterans Day 1987 It snowed this morning in Washington, and I saw, on the early news, a black gash carved from a white hillside. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial on a waiting-room TV in the VA hospital. The gray-haired veteran next to me telling about wearing his army uniform into a tavern in 1945—they bought him round after round. The boys finally home for Christmas. Even after we left Vietnam, in 1975, my haircut was brand enough. I wouldn’t have worn my class A’s into a civilian bar. I tried it once in a honky-tonk in Chowchilla, and was chased out. They wouldn’t believe I had never been to Nam. Today, I watched those real Vietnam vets in jeans and field jackets, beards and berets reflected in stone. Only 0900, but already a small legion was mustering. The TV cut away to the Wall Street Drill Team in a Philadelphia parade, a platoon of men and women in blue pinstripe suits with matched briefcases. They opened ranks and placed the cases in rosettes on the asphalt. Then countercolumns and other exotic marching maneuvers. The crowd on the street cheered, but there wasn’t a single chuckle or even a smile in the waiting room. In my mind, those vets at the Vietnam Memorial are wearing colors: a black and yellow eagle screaming on a shield, a sable horse against a field of gold, a sword notched in slotted stone. No, these patches aren’t coats of arms. They’re telegrams from a jungle, monkey howls, Page 38 a litany to match words cut into a wall. But you and I know it ‘s been almost fifteen years, and there’s the Ayatollah and Afghanistan. The Contras. American journalists sending their love on videos shot in some terrorist’s basement. And somewhere the Wall Street Drill Team is marching on. Page 39 The Fred Hill Briefcase Drill Team from Hometown Life (2021). This poem was occasioned by my seeing on TV news a drill team of men wearing business suits and carrying briefcases on Veterans Day in 1987. I can't recall now if I made up the name "Wall Street Drill Team" or if I maybe had actually seen the Fred Hill Briefcase Drill Team pictured above. Either way, drill was seen in that 1987 news show as comedic rather than ceremonial. As always, I'd love to get some feedback or discuss anything with all y'all. Comment, okay? Thanks. Ingat. DRAGONFLY FIRST CONTENTS PREVIOUS NEXT LAST

Dragonfly (page 37)

The next poem in Dragonfly was originally inspired by The Tunnels of Cu Chi, a book by Tom Mangold and John Penycate (1985). When I taught at Humboldt State University, starting in 1989, I met David Shaw, a Native American veterans' counselor at the university, and he told me about his US Army service in Vietnam where he was a tunnel rat. Thanks to David for some of the details in this poem. Tunnel Rat —for David Shaw Scorpions, salamanders, spiders, earthworms tracing dim tattoos in the target beam of my flashlight. Here, I am my own man. Up there, buddies stuck in the crotch of the Green Mother. The Corps. Vietnam: one hundred degree heat and leeches—shriek of jets and choppers—chicom grenades and pungi stakes. Just now, a scritch ahead to my left. A snake . . . or Charlie crawling to his post? I heft my .45 and flick my light off. I hold my breath. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Empty—just a hole in the earth—and then a face, the moon. My weapon’s on autogetem— Rock and Roll—Mad Minute—till I’m bleeding from both ears. Thunder jazzing the tunnel like Jimi’s guitar, like breaking glass. I’m out of there, back in the sun. Fire in the hole. Our frags boom in the ground, deep and hollow. Then another tunnel. Another tunnel. Always another tunnel. But you know I’ll always go down. The dark hush, the cool air on the back of my neck. I love the tunnel, the solid weight in my clenched hand of pure steel. There it is: the solace of pure fucking steel. Page 32 Photo from "The Tunnel Rat Experience in the Vietnam War" (The Armory Life). David Shaw is an Apache and joined the US Army during the Vietnam war in order to fulfill his tribe's cultural traditions of being a warrior. During that war, there were many Native Americans who joined the service for that very reason. Tom Holm's book Strong Hearts, Wounded Souls: Native American Veterans of the Vietnam War, discusses that phenomenon as well as how Native American soldiers often had an easier readjustment back to civilian life from their tribal ceremonies to heal warriors after war. Check out the two books I mention in this post about fighting in Vietnam. As always, I'd love to get some feedback or discuss anything with all y'all. Comment, okay? Thanks. Ingat. DRAGONFLY FIRST CONTENTS PREVIOUS NEXT LAST

Dragonfly (pages 35-36)

At this point in my book Dragonfly, I turn toward several poems focused on war, specifically the Vietnam war. Halloween 1963 Ricky Chang swept Edgewood Lane with his Johnny Seven assault rifle—single shot, rapid fire, grenade launcher, bazooka, breakaway pistol, and who can remember what else? In khakis and bush hat, little Frank Asahi was a desert rat, brandishing his M-1 carbine with its plastic wood-grain stock. I had on old fatigues, lovingly daubed with brown, black, yellow green. An olive-drab submachine gun, just like Vic Morrow’s on Combat. We patrolled San Francisco streets: Victorians perched on steep hills. Our rucksacks bulged with Tootsie Rolls, Chunkies, black and orange kernels of candy corn, pippin apples. At Edgewood Lane’s dead end, a house with windows shuttered like dark eyes. We chorused, “Trick or treat!” The young woman at the door said, “I’m from France, I’m sorry, I don?t have any candy,” until her hand fluttered like a white wing to her mouth. She whispered—not to us— “Dien Bien Phu.” We must have thought she was speaking French, maybe even giggled as she lurched like a spastic marionette back through the open door and froze in front of the living-room window, a statue. “That’s OK, lady,” we yelled, and tumbled down her steps in a clatter of bandoliers and plastic straps, whooping like movie Indians. Page 35 At that very moment, a Green Beret advisor was pinned down in a firefight at the edge of a montagnard village, his tribesmen firing scalpel bursts into green jungle. At that moment, President Diem’s generals were braiding an iron lariat around his palace: a noose of tanks and machine guns for Saigon’s mandarin. The morning sun like a blind eye. But my mind keeps circling back to that woman. I later heard her name: Jacqueline DuBois. Nine years before, a French paratrooper— her father—had thrown himself on a Viet Minh grenade, saving his squad just three hours before the French surrender. I see her now: poised at the window, her face and white dress barred by the half-open blinds. She sees the white flash. Asian faces—just boys, really—surging over the redoubt. A monsoon of hot metal. The sickly sweet stench of burning flesh. A mist of blood on the breeze. Her window faces east, and as she stands there, she cannot see the amber fields rolling away into the night, where America’s sleeping children dream on the edge of history. Page 36 Image by Kodini from Pixabay On Halloween 1963, I would have been eleven years old, and this poem draws from actual memories of my friends and me trick-or-treating. We were probably not very much aware of the American war in Vietnam heating up at that point, though ironically we would have been playing at being soldiers at war, as we did in real life. The fictional French woman I imagined for this poem would have been about our age when her father died in the French war in Vietnam nine years before. And of course for these boys, the Vietnam war would soon be very present in their lives, in American life in general, as the closing image of the poem suggests. As always, I'd love to get some feedback or discuss anything with all y'all. Comment, okay? Thanks. Ingat. DRAGONFLY FIRST CONTENTS PREVIOUS NEXT LAST