| Why Viet Nam? by Joseph Duemer | ||
Joseph Duemer's Diary
POETRY
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That’s the question for my generation. Flying into Hong Kong, riding to the hotel in the new Mercedes limo, I kept thinking, "Craig would have loved this." I am travelling on the government dime, a United States Information Agency "academic specialist" headed for Viet Nam. My old friend from college has been dead ten years. Dead of alcohol and self-absorption, but what a witty and engaging self-absorption! Before I knew him, Craig Lindenberger had traveled in Asia, mostly India, but also to Thailand, and I used to love to hear him talk about smoking hash in Calcutta or moving rubies over the mountains into . . . just where was never clear. Craig could make having malaria sound attractive, and I envied him his loquacious charm as well as his family’s wealth. He never made it to Viet Nam that I know of, and I would love to have shown it to him. For once, then, I’d be the one in the know. Craig was a raconteur and the exact truth mattered less to him than the story, which makes its own demands. Surprisingly for a kid who wanted to be a poet even then, I persistently had my nose stuck in the mundane and the actual. Over the last two years, Viet Nam has satisfied my desire for the actual, and it has brought me to a distrust of the stories we tell ourselves about who we are. Last week I gave a poetry reading for a bunch of high school kids enrolled in a summer creative writing program. A lovely, smart, and attentive group who had no memory of the war that figures so huge in my dreams. I read some of the poems that I’ve written about Viet Nam, and a couple of the translations I’ve been working on with my collaborator Dao Kim Hoa. After the reading during the Q & A, a young woman asked, "Why Viet Nam?" Since that’s the question just about everybody asks me when I start talking about my work in Hanoi, I feel I should try to answer it adequately for myself, if not adequately for those who ask. My friend Craig’s life was lived in service to the good story. He would have loved the opulent excess of Hong Kong, though by the time I made my third layover there I was bored with the place and just walked along the waterfront. Craig would have been entranced by the way wealth rubs up against poverty and by the sheer massive concentration of the place. Good story tellers are amoral creatures, and he wouldn’t have been bogged down by the liberal sentiments that limit my imagination—contrasts of color are more important than meanings to a storyteller. We’d have gone out for over-priced drinks, just as we used to do in Seattle, and told each other lies out of love and respect. I wish I could have brought him to Viet Nam. I wish I could have brought my friend to Viet Nam. I don’t think it would have saved him, but I think it would have shaken him the way it has shaken me, shaken him into a better version of himself maybe. I think—I hope—that is what it has done for me. I couldn’t have known it until I arrived, but I know now I went to Viet Nam for Craig. I also realized that I—always the sidekick—had the one thing my friend wanted more than anything he did have. I was a writer even then, however immature; Craig’s stories vanished in the telling. I think he’d have traded his charm for my dogged writing and erasing. Craig and I were blessed, the idea of blessing requiring that those who are blessed be undeserving: neither of us had to go to Viet Nam as soldiers in 1969, the year both our birthdays were entered in the first draft lottery. Like most blessed souls, we were also stupid as the night is long. Nobody I knew went to Viet Nam in 1969 or 70. How did we escape, this group of college boys? In my case it was dumb luck—just got a high number in General Hersey’s little lottery. I never had to make the moral choice some of my pals did to evade the draft, though even those friends mostly didn’t sweat it much—most found a shrink to write a letter, or a family friend who was an osteopath to say one leg was shorter than the other. So I guess you could say I went to Viet Nam in 1997 and again this year because I didn’t have to go back then. That would be part of the answer. Once Craig and I went out drinking along Seattle’s Pike Street. Starting at the Apple Theater, a "class" porno palace where I had the projectionist job, our intention being to work our way from Boren down to First, then back up Pike, having a drink in each bar. There must have been a hundred dives on Pike in 1977, and we were doomed to failure in more ways than one. Obviously, we never made it. But we almost got the crap beat out of us for pretending to be Viet Nam vets. I admit this to my shame, but we were shooting off our mouths when a real vet came along to hold the mirror of his fist up to our ignorance for us to study. Another time we took it into our heads to drive to California. To hit the road and write, getting jobs as we needed them, then moving on. We must have been overdosed on Kerouac and Steinbeck, but we took off driving and made it, high on pot and malt liquor and speed, all the way to the Napa Valley before we rolled Craig’s cherished VW squareback wagon. Rolled it three times on an empty highway. Came to rest on its side, all the windows blown out and the shoulder littered with our stuff—a guitar, a portable typewriter, a bunch of paperbacks, our clothes. Shaken, we pushed the broken car back onto its wheels; Craig got in and turned the key. It started, a miracle, and we drove all the way back to Seattle, no windshield, our eyes burning in the wind. That’s what we did, spoiled middle-class white boys, instead of go to Vietnam. In 1997 I went to Cu Chi, a district just north of Saigon. It had been a Vietcong stronghold during the American War, and the Viet Minh had already dug in there while fighting the French. Cu Chi is famous for its tunnels. On the day I visited, the weather was overcast, about 90 degrees and 90 percent humidity. The jungle was thick and leaden. The place has become a patriotic tourist attraction in Vietnam, like Gettysburg in the United States. It is an strange and alienating experience to walk on the victor’s battlefield, especially so when you might have been a foot soldier in the defeated one. It is terrible to walk on the bones of the dead of both armies. On that day, I walked with K., who had been one of the student leaders at Kent State. All around us Americans were talking loudly and exclaiming loudly how small the tunnels were. I went down in one, but did not take the whole tour—somehow it struck too close to home. There but for fortune . . . I found myself getting angry. Angry at the Americans, but angry too at the Vietnamese for turning this terrible place into a denatured version of itself. You can’t see twenty feet through that underbrush and the bomb craters are forty feet deep. It’s no place anyone should want to go. I’ve just read through the notes I made in May in Viet Nam. I must say they strike me as hurried and more than a little smug. Glancing off the surface of things. Perhaps I was more disoriented than I thought and needed to establish a worldly-wise identity for myself—superior to the mere tourists coming through the cafes. In fact, most of the young folks I met in the internet café were smart and independent, and almost all of them loved Viet Nam. I envied them, I realize now. They were all screwing each other, for one thing, which reminded me of my own youth. But they also brought a kind of innocence to their perception of Viet Nam that I, having done all the reading, as well as accidentally being the age I am, was not capable of. I was deeply gratified on the couple of occasions when travelers asked me about the history and literature of Viet Nam, but this was the gratification of the admired professor. Back in South Colton, I feel much more humble about my ability to comprehend Vietnamese history and culture, not to mention the language, which I continue to study. With Dao Kim Hoa I’ve just finished translating five poems by Huu Thinh and I may have learned more about Vietnam from this process than I did in my two months in the country. What I learned, however, seems impossible to describe. Literally impossible. I can tell you about the tree-lined streets of the Old Quarter, and I can tell you about the riverside cafes of Hoi An; I can even have a shot at describing the sense of holiness I felt visiting a little pagoda of no particular significance out among the orchards of the central coast. I could tell you how the older monk laughed with me when we managed to piece together a few sentence in "Vietlish" about the beauty of the evening, and how the two young monks stood smiling among the fruit trees in the courtyard in front of the sanctuary. I could tell you about the lunch prepared by the boatman’s wife on the Perfume River outside Hue. But the mental and spiritual world I have just begun to see into by learning the language is completely beyond my powers of description. Every time I open my Vietnamese dictionary I feel as if I have been granted access to a world that until three years ago might as well have been in another galaxy. Why Viet Nam? I thought the story began in 1997, but of course it began in 1967, when as a high school kid I first realized there was a place known as Viet Nam and that I might get sent there as a soldier. Arguing with my father about the war—he had "served in Korea"—though he never got closer than Japan—I realized he wanted me to go to Viet Nam; I knew what he didn’t know—what he couldn’t know—that he wanted me dead. He might have redeemed his own failure if only I had been willing to patriotically sacrifice myself to his ideals. I certainly would have been an easier son to live with had I been killed in the war. I wonder if that is why so many of my friends—those who did not actually go to Viet Nam—found other ways to sacrifice themselves. Through overdose, through car wreck, through extreme concentration on the self, so many of the men of my generation have obliterated by their fathers. By their actual fathers and by fathers of their country: Johnson, McNamara, Nixon, Kissenger. I name only the most notorious. I write this on the twenty-fifth anniversary of Richard Nixon’s resignation of the presidency amid the wreckage of the political scandal that has come to be known as Watergate, after the site of an insignificant and third-rate political burglary. But the arc of Nixon’s presidency was fixed before he took office by the combination of his character and the historical whirlwind of the Viet Nam War. National Public Radio has been inundated by historians and pundits evaluating the legacy of Nixon’s failed presidency, and some who should know better find themselves inclined to forgive Nixon after all these years. Even Daniel Schore, whose liberal credentials were forever established by being included on Nixon’s "enemies list" was in a conciliatory mood this week. During the dispensation of all this wisdom and forgiveness I kept hearing Dylan’s line from "Masters of War": "I’ll stand over your grave till I’m sure that you’re dead." Even that sentiment is insufficient, though, for Nixon isn’t dead. He lives in all those black flags flying from rural post offices and fire departments—you know, the bowed head and the letters POW / MIA—those flags. There is a whacko quasi-religious need at the margins of American society to continue to hate the Vietnamese. Just ask Chuck Norris, who has done more to feed the hysterical beast of racism against the Vietnamese than anyone since William Westmorland. I begin with my friend Craig and end with Nixon. Both seem stuck in inevitability. Just as the veterans—the dazed and damaged, and the fully integrated—are stuck. Just as we all are stuck, defined by a war waged in ignorance, malfeasance and dishonesty by men with a view of the world that could not, that cannot, be sustained. But it was the view of the world that I inherited. Here, I hand it back. I went to Vietnam to find what had been concealed from me. Craig and I would have sat in the goat blood restaurant and egged each other on. We would have talked about the craziness of the new American bombing, this time in Yugoslavia. We would have taken satisfaction in having been instinctively right about the war even though we knew about as much about Vietnam as LBJ and McNamara. Here, then, is a final diary entry from Hanoi, written on my first night in the city last spring: "I am afraid to travel much or to famous places," wrote Henry David Thoreau, "lest it completely dissipate the mind." Thoreau, of course, wrote at least one great travel book—two if you count sitting still in the woods as a kind of travel. Dissipation surely is one of the hazards of travel, whether you sit still or move restlessly around as I have been doing today, walking the streets of Hoan Kiem district, Hanoi’s Old Quarter, in a kind of dream state—my thoughts an unsteady scrawl of impressions. This is my second trip to Hanoi, so I know my way around the streets, which is not the same as knowing my way around the reality of the place. Travel need not dissipate the mind, as Thoreau feared; like danger, can also concentrate the mind. At the moment I am somewhere between dissipation and concentration, between fascinated and revolted. I am sitting in a goat meat restaurant at the intersection of Phan Dinh Phung and Hang Dau watching the Hanoi traffic slide past the curve of the lush little park across the street and head out of town across the Long Bien Bridge. The main link between the capital and the port city of Hiaphong, the bridge was bombed and rebuilt many times during the American War. And though I think about it often in Hanoi, tonight I am not thinking about the war. I am watching two groups of young Hanoians, one drinking what the menu calls "blood mixed with alcohol," the other cracking half a dozen duck embryos into a pot of soup cooking on a brazier on their table. Half hidden behind a pillar, I am free to stare, and as the only westerner in the place I am, so far as I can tell, entirely invisible. You would think it might be otherwise, that with my gray brush cut and beard I might stand out among the young Asian crowd, but since I so clearly do not belong here everyone ignores me. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that I am not a player in this scene, and so cannot be seen. The alcohol and blood mixture is delivered to the table in small Coke bottles—a form of recycling the execs back in Atlanta would certainly disapprove. It is the deep scarlet color of hibiscus flowers. You can also get the alcohol without the blood, this being about the same pinkish gold as the liters of gasoline in plastic bottles for sale at curbside all over the city. (It is a city of a million motorbikes.) The menu also features half cooked meat and—for desert?—frozen blood, which probably looks like raspberry sorbet. I’m sticking with the big bottles of Tiger beer, which are opened for me at the table in deference to my western notions of hygiene. The meaning of Hanoi is in its colors. The night is cool and damp. The endless stream of motorbikes beep and weave, the occasional truck, tourist bus, or Toyota blares its horn to get through, and if my mind is not wholly dissipated, Hanoi has begun to spread my consciousness pretty thin. Maybe it is only jet lag. It is a form of Dissipation, though, that strips away illusions. In the hotel bar earlier a retired American academic asked me if I thought the Vietnamese had forgiven Americans for the war. "I don’t expect them to forgive us," I said. He was not a stupid or insensitive man, but like all Americans he wanted to be loved. It is a desire that has fogged our vision of this country. Even when we were bombing the hell out of them, we only wanted the Vietnamese to see things our way, and we expected that if we could only get through to the people they would begin to love us. It is a fever dream we have repeated in Yugoslavia, and the Vietnamese see it for what it is. Every day the English language press here carries another short article about this or that trade union or professional organization calling for an end to air strikes against Yugoslavia, and while the statements are standard government issue, they do reflect the general attitude of people I’ve talked to. Waiters will ask, discovering I’m American, "Why does Clinton want to bomb a little country like Yugoslavia?" If they are trying to be polite, the person asking the question will call him president Clinton. They get CNN, but as far as I can tell, the Vietnamese man or woman in the street doesn’t put much stock in the propaganda arm of the American state, or the "Western Alliance." The Vietnamese do know, of course, given their history, the exact meaning of the word "Western." Given the difficulties of language, it is nearly impossible to offer an adequate explanation for the bombing of Yugoslavia, which inevitably leads to oversimplification or silence. Over-simplification, then silence. I sit in one of the dives The lines come back to me now as I sit and watch the traffic head out of town over the Red River. Perhaps I’ll have that drink of blood after all.
Three Versions from the Vietnamese Note: Though I have had recourse to the Vietnamese text, the first of these versions is indebted to the anonymous English translation in Vietnamese Literature: Historical Backgrounds and Texts (Hanoi: Red River); the second is a very free retranslation of the poem described in the subsequent note; the final poem is very ancient, originally composed using Chinese characters to write the Vietnamese language: the version presented here is not a translation, but begins with the English of Hu?nh Song Thông (An Anthology of Vietnamese Poems From the Eleventh through the Twentieth Centuries). On Reading Some Verses of Tieu Thanh After Than Hien (19th c.) On West Lake the gardens are run wild.
The Widow Replies to the Matchmaker* Doesn’t he know I’m a widow
Poem after Trán Minh-tông* The mountains’ blue steel
* King Trán Minh-tông (1300-1357) composed a poem called “The Bach-?àng River” in which he celebrated two famous Vietnamese victories against invading armies, one in 980 and the other in 1288. The theme of the king’s poem is that a smaller army can defeat a larger one if they use patient strategies and good tactics, the clear implication being a warning to larger powers who wish to impose their rule on the Viets. In each of the two battles the Vietnamese general drove stakes into the river bottom that allowed the invaders boats to come up river at high tide, but blocked them from returning when the tide was low. The present poem began as a version of this old poem, but then went its own way. _________________________________________________________________________ JOSEPH DUEMER is the author of Customs, from the University of Georgia Press Contemporary Poetry Series (1987), and Static, from Owl Creek Press (1996). His most recent collection of poems is Primitive Alphabets (chapbook White Heron Press 1999). He is the co-editor of the anthology of dog poems, Dog Music. Making Music : Contemporary Collaborations Between Poets and Composers (Border Crossings , Vol 8), by Joseph Duemer and David Rakowski, will be published in April, 2000. His poems have appeared in numerous magazines, including Tar Poetry Northwest, Antioch Review, New England Review, The Iowa Review, American Poetry Review, River Poetry, The Denver Quarterly, Manoa, Carolina Quarterly, and Boulevard. He is a Professor of Humanities at Clarkson University and the Poetry Editor of The Wallace Stevens Journal. Visit Joseph Duemer's Website: http://web.northnet.org/duemer |
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