Fighting Kite (pages 24-25)

I read this poem just a week ago to an audience of veterans. I gave a reading on 18 March 2025 at the Iowa Veterans Home, and this poem was well-received. This poem has had an interesting publication history. It first appeared in The Journal of American Culture (1993). Then it was published in my poetry collection Dragonfly (1994). Reprinted in Asian American Literature: A Brief Introduction and Anthology (1996). Then it appeared again in Fighting Kite (2007). The poem has also appeared a couple of times in the blog. First in 2009, in "Keeping Six Words Tumbling in Air" (when I discussed it with some University of Georgia students whose professor had assigned it in an Asian American literature course) and second in 2025, as part the serialization of my book Dragonfly. In the more recent post from this year, I said, "this poem needs a trigger warning: a derogatory word for Asian appears in it, a word that is here because this is soldier talk from the '70s. I have not changed this word because it is true to the voice of this character (and it is a character, not myself)."         A fragrance remembered is Vietnam— the acrid odor of gunpowder and tracer fire, smudgy cooking fires in every hooch, the pungent scent of nước mắm and water buffalo shit, a father's acid sweat as he searches for his lost son in some ville, smoking from an H&I strike—all this was my wish. I'd look at my class A's in their plastic bag in the closet and wish sometimes I too had been to the 'Nam. I remembered basic training at Fort Ord, double timing in the sun to the range. "Ready on the left! Ready on the right! Fire at will!" Late nights in the latrine, I wrote my father long letters about being afraid I'd be sent over there. Everyone in the platoon was afraid of being sent, but not one of us admitted it. "Sure wish they'd ship me over to that motherfucker," we said to each other in the noonday light, "Vietnam— can't wait. Shoot me a fucking gook or two, fire mortars all goddamn night." Papa'd write back, "Son, let God's will be done. Just be a good son. Just do your job. If they send you, then they send you. That's all." And I'd lie on my dark bunk and smoke—the fiery tip of the cigarette curling like a tracer ricochet—wishing I loved it all. C-rations, the firing range, the memorized Vietnamese phrases, my leaky shelter half on bivouac. All for Papa. That was as close as I would get to my father's war. I'm sure my grandfather called him a good son, both in the U.S. Army, the Philippine Scouts. Their Vietnam had been Bataan. When the sergeant would send my father out on point, did he wish even for a moment that he hadn't joined up? Did artillery fire Page 24         make him cringe in his foxhole? That time he was caught in crossfire, did he try to will himself into a tree, a rock, a bird? Papa, I knew only the mortar's crump and whoosh, the parabolic path reaching up to California sun. I never knew the shrapnel's white-hot whistle at arc's end. Two nights ago, I dreamt I was in Vietnam: a farmer runs for the tree line—I fire a crisp M-60 burst—Vietcong, for sure, for sure. The LT sends me up to verify. In shimmering sun, Charlie's face is the one I wash in my helmet. No. It's your face, Papa. Page 25 Here's an excerpt from the 2009 blog post on this poem, with regard to some of the specific wording: In line 6, "H&I" stands for Harrassment and Interdiction: indiscriminate artillery fire at the enemy to break their morale; of course, this procedure caused a great deal of so-called "collateral damage," i.e., injury and death among civilians and noncombatants. Ain't military terminology as fun as a barrel of junkies? In line 7, "class A's" are semi-formal Army uniforms, similar to a suit and tie. A "shelter half" refers to half of a pup tent (line 24); two soldiers would team up to make up a single tent for bivouac or encampment. The Philippine Scouts (line 27) were an elite US Army unit before and during WWII; the Philippine Army was a separate force from the Philippine Scouts. In line 37, an M-60 is a heavy, belt-fed machine gun. Finally, "LT" stands for lieutenant and is pronounced ell-TEE (line 38). This excerpt continued with a reference to the 1996 textbook appearance: "With regard to the Wong textbook in particular, there are two errors. The word 'is' in the first line was typeset as 'in' in the textbook. Also, 'nước mắm' is misspelled in the textbook as 'nuoe mam,' without the diacritics essential in printed Vietnamese." The reason I brought it up is that blog post was intended to address some students at the University of Georgia who were reading my poems in the textbook in a class, and their professor contacted me to discuss the poems with them. The added benefit is that my own students in classes where we discussed my poems in the textbook since then have had that resource as well. With regard to poetic craft, this poem is a sestina. Here's what I said in that 2009 blog post: "[T]he sestina repeats the ending words of each line in the sestets (six-line stanzas) so that they eventually appear at the end of every possible location (the first line of the sestet, the second line, etc.). Then the repeating words (called repetons [REHP-uh-tawns]) appear in a three-line stanza (known as an envoi [own-VWAH]), two words per line, one at the end of the line and the other in the middle." This is actually not accurate . . . I misnamed the repeating end-words; they are in fact called teleutons (TELL-you-tawns). Take a look at the 2009 blog post for a diagram (in color!) of how the teleutons cycle throughout the poem. I quite like my discussion of how the teleutons are altered as the poem unfolds: As you can see, I "cheat" by altering the repetons occasionally (this is pretty common practice among contemporary writers of the sestina). For example, "Vietnam" becomes "'Nam" in stanza 2, "Vietnamese" in stanza 4, and finally "Vietcong" in the envoi. Almost always sestina alterations are done through consonance ("wish" ——> "whoosh" ——> "wash"). I'm pretty proud of how, in stanza 6, the "sent"/"send" sound is rendered by "arc's end" — cool, eh? I'm even more proud (perversely so) of "father" becoming "motherfucker" . . . a kind of literalist double entendre. And there is even a basis here (admittedly distant) in rich consonance: /f/ and /r/ in father and motherfucker, not to mention that the /th/ sound appears in both words. Poetry . . . no, poetics . . . is fun, kids! Finally, I want to focus on the genesis of the poem. I had read an excellent story, "The Persistence of Memory" by Walter Howerton, Jr. (from an anthology called The Perimeter of Light), about a Vietnam-vet wannabe who is driven to fakery to try to connect with his dead WWII-vet father. This poem is an imitation of that fine story, using some of my own autobiographical details: I am a Vietnam era vet — I was in the US Army during the Vietnam war but was not sent there — and I imagined a soldier like me connecting with his WWII-vet father, modeled after my own father. Anyway, the poem is not autobiographical, essentially, although it does use elements from my father's and my personal history. There's more on this in the earlier two blog posts. As always, I'd love to get some feedback or discuss anything with all y'all. Comment, okay? Thanks. Ingat.  FIGHTING KITE   INTRO FRONT CONTENTS PREVIOUS NEXT LAST