Veterans Day ... Papa, Tatay, and the Library of Congress

As I mentioned in my previous blog post, two weeks ago I had the pleasure and honor of reading my poems at the Library of Congress in a symposium honoring "Unsung Heroes: Asian Pacific American Heroism in WWII." This kind of recognition in Washington, DC, has been long needed and comes at an opportune historical moment, with Congress's recent passage of reparation one-time payments to the Filipino soldiers of WWII who were stripped, immediately after the war, of the veterans' benefits FDR promised them. At that event, I had the honor of meeting retired General Antonio Taguba as well as the Honorable Tammy Duckworth (Assistant Secretary at the VA [Veterans Affairs], a decorated Army veteran from our war in Iraq — where she lost both legs and the partial use of an arm — and still a Major in the Illinois National Guard). I also had the genuine pleasure of meeting Dr. Valentin Ildefonso, US Army Philippine Scout in WWII, and a retired Lieutenant Colonel from the US Air Force, where he served as a medical doctor. Dr. Ildefonso also volunteered later as a doctor during the Vietnam war. (By the way, Dr. Ildefonso was featured in an online news article today for Veterans Day.) Dr. Valentin Ildefonso and Vince Gotera As you may already know from other posts in this blog, my father Martin Gotera and my grandfather Felix Gotera also served in the Philippine Scouts in WWII, where they both were in the Bataan Death March. So it was particularly touching and moving for me to meet these three Army vets, whose courage and service are so allied to the esprit de corps that was the spine of the Gotera family's contributions to the US Army, not just my father and grandfather, but also my brother Pepito's US Army service and mine during the Vietnam war. As part of my poetry reading at the symposium, I read the following poem, which describes my father's relationship with my grandfather, my Lolo whom all of us grandchildren and great-grandchildren called simply Tatay, the Filipino word for "father," because he was so much the patriarch for us all. He was a gentle, soft-spoken old man when I knew him, so unlike the chilling stories Papa told me of Tatay's brutal discipline towards him as a child. The poem, one of three I read at the Library of Congress, describes two sides of that relationship: first, how Tatay whipped my father cruelly and routinely, and second, how Papa found Tatay in the Japanese concentration camp and cared for him as he would have his own child. Tatay My grandfather in a faded photograph is           a centurion blowing a Christmas party horn,                     on his head my foil Roman legionnaire helmet. I remember him smiling like a boddhisatva           as he pulled on scuffed brogans to bail out                     my uncle in the drunk tank — Tito Augusto had been brawling again. But in 1933,           Tatay seemed another man. My father                     at twelve was circumcised with a couple of buddies. The ring of boys.           The penknife. Blood dwindling.                     When Tatay heard, he bent my father over the Army trunk again. Set up           the pitcher and glass. He made his                     two-inch-wide leather belt lick the boy's naked back. Resting, he sipped water, then           got up, belt in hand. My father glanced over                     at the pitcher to see how much was left. There were other stories. How after           the Bataan death march, they met, father                     and son, in the concentration camp near Capas. Tatay shivered at noon, muttering of           bodies mantled with wings, ashimmer.                     My father could see two compounds away, they were burning wood — bark the Igorots           use to cure malaria. My father crept                     under the wire. A butterfly's lazy tango in the glare. That itch           between his shoulderblades. A bead                     of sweat. The imperial guard's boots a yard to the left. The Philippine Army           regulars who were burning the wood smirked                     when they caught him, gathering branches in his arms. With fists and bare feet           pounding his head and back, did he recall                     those rituals of trunk and pitcher? Cradling a bundle of sticks, my father           crawled back. I can see the bark dancing                     now in water, next to the cot where Tatay moans in his sleep. I hear my father           singing softly. I can almost make it out, but                     I can't quite place the tune, a Tagalog lullaby. — Vince Gotera, first appeared in The Madison Review (1989). In the poem, I highlight an ironic and iconic difference between Filipinos: the Philippine Army soldiers beat my father because he was a Philippine Scout, that is, a member of the US Army. In this context, because the US Army can no longer protect my father, they see him as too big for his britches because he is a Filipino in the US Army — uppity, someone whom they would see as having previously lorded over them. The irony is that Papa is beaten in order to save the life of the man who used to beat him. The other two poems I read at the symposium have been featured in the blog already: "Honor, 1946" and "Refusal to Write an Elegy." In the first, we see another side of my father being caught between different racial forces: instead of being attacked by Filipinos, he is attacked by white Americans. In the second, we see the war demons he faces, not from external attack but rather from within. Besides my own small part in the symposium, I was truly moved at the scope and span of the subjects covered, the articulate speakers who gave presentations not only about Filipino Americans in the war but also about the original Flying Tigers, Chinese American fighter pilots who volunteered to fly for the Chinese Air Force against the Japanese even before 1941; the Japanese American soldiers of the most highly decorated American military unit, the 442nd Regimental Combat Team; the Asian American women who served in various military capacities during the war; and so on. I learned quite a lot, and the symposium was indeed a joyous occasion celebrating the tremendous contributions Asian Pacific Americans made to the American war effort. As General Taguba said in his keynote address, "The Asian Pacific American families who join us today have marked a lasting legacy in our history not to be forgotten. . . . Our unsung heroes have many untold stories yet to be shared. It is their time. It will always be their time." Amen to that, kapatid, kababayan. Today is Veterans Day. Today is also my father's birthday. If he were living today, Papa would be 88 years young. In the '60s, he was a pioneer in the fight to restore the veterans' rights of the Filipino WWII veterans. In San Francisco, he founded an organization, the Filipino American Veterans and Dependents Association, which worked on this problem, setting out what was probably the first class action suit in the struggle. About the recent legislation of one-time payments ($15,000 to Filipino American veterans in the US, $9,000 to Filipino veterans in the Philippines), I'm certain my father would say, if he were here, "Although this payment is, in many eyes, too little too late, it is a significant gesture nonetheless; we in the Filipino American community, however, should still push for the full restoration of these veterans' benefits." You rock, Papa. Happy birthday! Veterans Day will always be your signature holiday. P.S. Many thanks to Reme Grefalda, librarian extraordinaire at the Library of Congress's Asian Division, for inviting me to be a participant in this historic symposium. Maraming salamat, thanks so much, for your hospitality, Reme. I hope I can return the favor sometime if you ever visit Iowa. Now, just a couple more pictures (click on any of the pictures above or below to see larger versions). The Library of Congress is made up of incredibly beautiful buildings. If you are ever in Washington, DC, you should definitely check out the Library. Many visitors go to the Capitol, the Smithsonian, the various memorials. Go also to the Library; it is the living monument to our country's intellectual aspirations and achievements. Kluge Room, where the symposium was held Hallway in the Jefferson Building Lobby of the Jefferson Building Friends, please write a comment below. I'd really love to hear your responses. If you have visited the Library of Congress, tell us all about it. Thanks for visiting the blog! Come back often.

My Poetry Reading at the Library of Congress, Monday, 10/26/09

Hi, everyone. Many MANY apologies for having neglected my blog for so long. It's like I fell off a bicycle, walked it home, and then for some reason couldn't ride it again. The more time passed, the harder it became to pick up again. I promise to get back on the blog bycicle here after I get back from Washington, DC, in three days or so. I am typing this blog post in a hotel business center before I take the train into the city and do the tourist thing. Nothing like a new location to liven up the blog-making. Which I am finding that I'm having to relearn as I go here. I'm in DC because I'm giving a poetry reading tomorrow, Monday, 10/26, as part of the conference "Unsung Heroes: Asian Pacific American Heroism during World War II." This is open to the public so come and check it out. The event runs from 9:00 A.M. to 4:00 P.M., and my reading is, I believe, at 9:00. I will be reading poems regarding WWII from my collections Ghost Wars and Fighting Kite. If you do make the reading, come up and say hi to me. Also, there will be copies of Fighting Kite for sale. I'll sign one for you. See you tomorrow? A quick update: I just talked by phone to Reme Grefalda, the organizer of tomorrow's conference, and found out my reading will be around 10:00. Before my presentation is the keynote address by retired Army general Antonio Taguba. Do come at 9:00 anyway to catch his address ... it will be well worth it. Taguba, you may recall, is the general who investigated the Abu Ghraib atrocities and wrote the official US Army report on the incident, a report in which he was extremely critical. He even testified that he was convinced Rumsfeld had lied to Congress about Abu Ghraib. Later, after his retirement from the military, Taguba publicly accused the Bush administration of war crimes. I am certainly looking forward to his keynote address and to meeting him. His father and my father both fought in the Philippine Scouts (a US Army unit) and both survived the Bataan Death March. Incidentally, it seems just unbelievable to me that I could be just a couple of years younger than a General — a retired one, at that! Somewhere inside, I'm still that young Army soldier who saw all Generals as old men. But it was about 35 years ago when I was that guy. Does that make me an old man now? Hmm. Nahhhh.

One Veteran's Day

Today, November 11, is my father's birthday. Martin Avila Gotera would have been 87 today, and he has been gone for almost twenty years.

Today is also Veterans' Day. It has always seemed fitting to me that Papa's birthday is the same day as Veterans' Day. Formerly called "Armistice Day" . . . in other words, a day of peace, of cessation of war.

From the day he was born, soldiering was Papa's life. His father, my Lolo Felix, a "lifer" in the US Army, Philippine Scouts. The beginning of a kind of dynasty . . . Felix, a brigade master sergeant; Martin, a second lieutenant; and then two out of Papa's three sons also in the US Army, Pepito and Vince, one a Vietnam vet, a combat grunt, and the other a Vietnam era vet.

When I was a child, my father worked in the Veterans Administration as an adviser and contact rep for vets. So just about each of his twenty-four hours was spent with former soldiers, sailors, and Marines, making sure they got their veteran's pensions by day, and then at night he would suffer through combat flashbacks and nightmares.

During that same time, my father also gave community service for vets; he started a grassroots organization, FAVADA . . . the Filipino American Veterans and Dependents Association. This organization, as far as I know, was the first to work on what is now called the Filipino Veterans Equity issue. My father and his organization worked on the first class-action suit against the US government to reclaim the rights and privileges stolen from Filipino vets in the 1946 Rescission Act.

I wrote the following poem as a response to the National WWII Memorial, in particular from hearing that Filipino American writer Bino Realuyo was condemning the memorial because of his father being denied burial at Arlington Cemetery . . . again because of that damned Rescission Act.

Looking for Double Victory

Written in response to the dedication of the
National World War II Memorial, 29 May 2004

“The V for victory sign is being displayed prominently in all so-called
democratic countries which are fighting for victory over aggression,
slavery, and tyranny. If the V sign means that to those now engaged
in this great conflict, then let we colored Americans adopt the
double VV for a double victory. The first V for victory over enemies
from without, the second V for victory over our enemies from within.”

—

James G. Thompson, letter to the Pittsburgh Courier, 31 January 1942 (quoted by Ronald Takaki in Double Victory: A Multicultural History of America in World War II)

Around and through these fifty-six pillars
of white stone hung with wreaths of bronze,
drift and dive four hundred thousand ghosts —
keening, unheard, indignant desert birds.

The war to uphold FDR’s Four Freedoms,
fought by Americans who never in their lives
tasted freedom of speech, freedom of worship,
freedom from want, freedom from fear. Never.

Dorie Miller, black Navy messman
at Pearl Harbor, firing an ack-ack gun,
a weapon he was forbidden to touch, downed
four Japanese bombers . . . strange fruit.

Ernest Childers, Muscogee infantryman
With the “Thunderbird,” single-handedly
cleared two German machine-gun nests . . .
first Indian to win the Medal of Honor.

Guy Louis Gabaldon, Chicano
Marine from East LA, fluent speaker
of Japanese, captured eight hundred
prisoners on his own without a shot.

Susan Ahn, daughter of Ahn Chang Ho,
renowned Korean freedom fighter . . . first
Asian American in the US Navy, first
woman gunnery officer in 1944.

My Papa, my Lolo — Martin and Felix Gotera —
trudge through a fog of kayumanggi dust
lit by sword blade’s sinister flash. Bataan!
Bloody but unbowed. Survive. Mabuhay.

My friend Bino curses these pillars, calls
them “horns.” His father, death-march survivor, denied
burial at Arlington. “No Filipinos Allowed.”
The Rescission Act. Give then take away.

Friends, although eight eagles lift here two
laurel wreaths for victory, the “Double VV”
has yet to be fully won. The demon vanquished
abroad still lives, here, at home. Flourishing.

We still recall with anguish Truman’s bombs,
two hundred thousand victims, mostly women
and children, black rain, skin burning. Legacy
of dishonor. Not a military necessity.

Today, let us remember these honored dead.
Let us remember the civilians — many women —
who riveted planes, who lived behind barbed wire.
Live up to the vision of all these heroes . . . all.

Let us win the second victory, at last.
Make the Four Freedoms real for each and all.
Then let these four hundred thousand ghosts, angels,
Rest their fiery wings in God’s breast, and sleep.

— Vince Gotera, from Mirror Northwest (2006)

Papa, with your interest in and passion for civil rights, you would be amazed to know that now we have an African American president-elect. So that in some measure, the "double VV" is becoming real. Rev. Jesse Jackson was interviewed on TV at Grant Park in Chicago, where Obama's election was being celebrated on the night of Election Day, and he talked about the double VV . . . the "enemies from within" not yet vanquished but certainly defeated that night.

As a birthday and veterans' day present to you, Papa, I want to highlight this stanza from the poem above, because it highlights the spirit in which you held your Bataan death march and prisoner-of-war camp experiences:

My Papa, my Lolo — Martin and Felix Gotera —
trudge through a fog of kayumanggi dust
lit by sword blade’s sinister flash. Bataan!
Bloody but unbowed. Survive. Mabuhay.

Happy birthday, Papa. I love you. And I miss you. Rest your fiery wings in God's breast and sleep. This is YOUR veteran's day . . . the celebration of one veteran.

NOTE: For those interested in Filipino veterans equity, check out this background info from the PBS American Experience series.

For those of you whose main interests in reading my blog are poetry and poetics, this poem appeared in the Contemporary Poetry section of the Mirror Northwest online journal. This anthology is collected for students of poetry to use, especially the creative writing students of Wenatchee Valley College. With that pedagogical purpose in mind, I appended the following note to that publication:

To mimic the pillars of the National WWII Memorial, I end-stopped each of the quatrains so that they are all freestanding. Also, to retain the memorial’s spirit of honoring the combatants, I wrote the poem in pentameter — admittedly, loose and rough — to allude to the tradition of the iambic pentameter heroic couplet.

Go check out Contemporary Poetry / Mirror Northwest.

War Stories

Refusal to Write an Elegy


Papa, lately at night when the phone rings
raveling midnight into tatters, I freeze.
Just two days ago, once more your wife's
voice described the extension cord

tied to a joist in the basement, the round
loop hanging: "I'm making a rope." And there
were other times. The razor blade.
The ritalins, sixty-four white pills,

each a period for every year-long
sentence of your life. Your screams
punctuated my childhood nights;
your nightmares melded into fairy tales,

mga kuwento ng duwende. For others: the Grimm
Brothers. For me: Bataan, Corregidor, jungles
and nipa huts, a handsome soldier named Martin.
No dragons, no cinder-faced damsels,

only the night, pulsing with tracer fire.
Or maybe a samurai blade's insistent sheen.
One night, nearly stepping on an enemy soldier,
you poised on that teeter-totter, oblivion,

then all of you softly backed into still virgin
tracks and ran. Jungle gloom raveled by carbine
fire before and behind. You never knew if American
or Japanese bullets ripped your friend Pabling

apart, a sucking chest wound in his side.
And once, hemmed in by tanks, rifles, a ravine,
and a blazing cane brake, each of you slid
beneath the flames. Most escaped. But one

or two, were left behind, screaming.
Another time, a corporal hit by a shell
ran from you — headless and faltering.
His arms flailed like a windmill.

Papa, when you watch TV,
you hammer your fist into your thigh.
Nailing yourself to the morning. To the yellow
heart of an egg, sunny side up.

I see you. Your back is jammed up against
the bole of a tree. Brown skin, your brown
uniform chameleoning the rough bark.
The Japanese plane, a hot red sun,

spits chunks of metal strung
on wires. Beads of spouting earth
converge. At the focus,
you've clawed bark under your fingernails.

Papa. Papa. Remember, they missed you that time.

— Vince Gotera, first appeared in Zone 3 (1989).

My father, Martin Avila Gotera, served in the US Army's Philippine Scouts during WWII; he was a corporal in the 14th Engineers and he specialized in blowing up bridges. He was given a battlefield promotion to 2nd lieutenant for meritorious service. At the right is the young soldier in his US Army officer's uniform, taken in downtown San Francisco, probably in 1946.

When I was growing up, my father often told me war stories . . . I remember him doing that when I was no older than five or six, I'm guessing. These stories were very vivid to me; as I write this I can bring back visual memories that were either dreams I had from his stories or perhaps what I saw in my mind's eye as Papa would tell me those stories, again and again. Perhaps I asked to hear them as bedtime stories . . . who knows?

My father suffered from schizophrenia, surely brought on by such horrific combat experiences as those he told me about and which appear in this poem. Though he also describes schizophrenic incidents that he remembered from his earlier teenage years, so the disease had probably already manifested before his US Army service.

In any case, during the war (or immediately afterwards), Papa was diagnosed with combat fatigue (WWII lingo for what we now call posttraumatic stress disorder, PTSD). All my life, Papa suffered from those symptoms now so familiar to us from Hollywood Vietnam-vet movies: frequent nightmares of war, flashbacks, paranoia, extreme depression, thoughts of suicide, etc., etc.

The poem itself goes back to my first MFA poetry workshop with David Wojahn at Indiana University in the fall of 1986. I remember that it was the second poem I submitted to the class. And it didn't fare well in workshop. But I worked on it and worked on it . . . really as a gift to Papa. In a similar vein to Dylan Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night," my entreaty to my father not to succumb to death, to awful memory, to the demons of schizophrenia.

And I'm happy to say that now, almost twenty years after Papa died of illness, not of suicide, the poem still holds up. I put it in my 2003 chapbook Ghost Wars as well as in Fighting Kite (2007). This recent title is my elegy for Papa, for Martin Avila Gotera . . . a book-length elegy that completes the cycle begun by my earlier "Refusal to Write an Elegy." Good night, sweet prince, / And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest! Amen.

On the Eve of the Presidential Election

It's after midnight and I wonder what thoughts flit through the minds of Barack Obama and John McCain as they slide into sleep, as they spiral down the hypnagogic well.

Although much of the election talk these latter days focuses on the ailing US economic system, I trust thoughts of war are not far from the consciousness and conscience of both McCain and Obama . . . thoughts, that is, of American men and women in the war zone at this exact moment.

In the spirit of such necessary remembrance, I offer this poem:

Guard Duty


A young soldier squints into thick black night
hoping no hostile sapper is cutting through
barbed wire, a bayonet and grenades tied
to his waist . . . invisible. This mute scenario

lies at the heart of three generations' bedtime
stories: my Lolo and my Papa in the US
Army, Philippine Scouts, death march in Bataan,
my brother Pepito in the 'Nam, nightmares

of Agent Orange. That young soldier could have been
any one of them . . . or me, on guard mount at Fort Ord
during Vietnam. Almost dreaming machine gun
recoil in our hands. Screaming, an oncoming horde.

Never again . . . young women and men should dream
of breezes in trees, soft rain, sunshine. Never again.

— Vince Gotera, from Poets Against the War (2003).

This poem is inextricably connected to President Bush's policies . . . my own protest against what has come to be called "The Bush Doctrine." I wrote this sonnet as part of the Poets Against the War movement and website . . . you may remember Sam Hamill's outraged response to Laura Bush's suggestion of a poetry symposium at the White House in early 2003. Having just heard of the president's proposal to use "shock and awe" saturation bombing against Iraq, Hamill organized a poets' protest and within weeks, thousands of poets took part.

The First Lady cancelled her planned symposium, but by mid-February, when she had hoped the symposium would take place, over 5000 poets from around the world had contributed some 9000 poems. I am proud that "Guard Duty" was one of those poems and that it was eventually selected for Sam Hamill's Poets Against the War print anthology.

"Guard Duty" is rooted as well in the history of Gotera men serving in the US Army. My father and grandfather were in the elite Philippine Scouts of the US Army . . . both of them fought in WWII, both in the infamous Bataan death march, both POWs. My half-brother Pepito and I both served in the US Army during the Vietnam war; he was sent to "the 'Nam" and I was not, making me a Vietnam Era vet. (All of this is described in more detail in my essay "Love and War, Contrapuntal: A Self-Interview," from Pinoy Poetics, edited by Nick Carbó.)

On a related front, there is no good news for the movement to restore US veteran status to Filipino American and Filipino soldiers of WWII. A little background: a quarter million Filipino men were recruited to fight in WWII, and FDR promised them the same status and treatment as American war veterans. After WWII ended, the US rescinded this status . . . an appalling injustice that now spans six decades.

Earlier this year, the Senate passed a bill to restore veterans' rights and benefits to Filipino WWII vets. Unfortunately, time has run out for the parallel bill in the House, though many complained that the House bill had become too watered down, calling for a relatively small lump-sum payment rather than restoration of full veteran status. As Tuesday's election nears, it's worth noting that Senator Obama was a co-sponsor of the Filipino Veterans Equity Act.

Some background links on the Filipino Veterans Equity issue: (1) a recent call to action from the National Federation of Filipino American Associations; (2) an AP news release on the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus and its support for Filipino veterans; and a Pacific Citizen article on the recent failure of the House bill.

In any case, back to poetry and war: although the end of my poem "Guard Duty" could seem overly romanticized to some readers, let us hope nonetheless that poetry can, in the long run, stand up to violence. That words really can end wars, that a true and long-lasting peace is indeed possible.

GO OBAMA!