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