Poetry Feature:
'Only the Dead': Vietnam

Editors' Preface

In 1963, I was marching around the University of Connecticut - Storrs campus. If you attended a state school, Air Force or Army ROTC was mandatory for two years.

We fell in three times a week with our spit-shined shoes and polished buttons for drill practice. A few people I never saw in class, with long hair, beards, peace symbols, and beads, greeted us with signs, chants, and booing. We didn't know why they were hazing us. We didn't look at them. Eyes front.

In November, Kennedy was shot and Thanksgiving was solemn for most of the nation. By l964, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones had lifted our spirits, buttressed by Joan Baez, Bob Dylan and company.

'Vietnam' was not a word we heard much then. 'Drafted' was. We heard both with increasing frequency and distaste. Bixby flunked out that first semester and, in the weeks before he left to join the Navy, he spent a lot of time in his room in the dark, stroking a long, fluorescent light that glowed mysteriously at the touch of his hand.

As a graduation gift, I got my 1A draft card. My parents wanted me to go to Canada. Instead, I went to live with a woman named Rosalie in Washington, D.C., where the Summer of Love was in full swing. After a long talk with the department chairman, I entered the Ph.D. program at The Catholic University of America with two perks: teaching creative writing as a graduate assistant and the reinstatement of my 2S deferment.

Our house was at 25th and Penn, halfway between the White House and Georgetown. We could sit on the front porch in our rocking chairs (yes, we actually had a front porch on Pennsylvania Avenue and no one ever bothered our rocking chairs) and watch what looked like most of the world going by to protest the war. We watched the war on TV. We watched the astronauts walk on the moon.

We weren't apolitical. We were busy, uninformed, and leery of close associations, especially with Nick Greer, the then President of SDS (Students for a Democratic Society), and his wife. We were amazed at their "knowledge," in awe, but unconvinced of their certainty. At one SDS rally, Nick Greer called Rosalie a "pig" because we weren't falling in with their program. But we were there. We were photographed with the Greers, Abbie Hoffman, other radicals--and not by tourists. After Nick Greer was busted (allegedly for having a trunk full of illegal weapons), Rosalie and I were the only people who would ever come to visit them, or be seen in their company. Or, so they said.

I have no idea why I didn't get drafted. If I had been, I would have gone. I would have done what they told me to do. They were drafting almost everyone, particularly undesirables. In the D.C. area at that time, "undesirables" included a wide range of men--boys. I personally know boys with steel plates in their heads, white boys who had been in suburban mental hospitals, who were drafted and sent to Vietnam. Of course, there were disproportionate numbers of blacks, the poor, Hispanics, and those who couldn't figure where to run away to, or didn't have the cash to get there. Others were well-off, connected, and still couldn't get out of it. Drafting almost everyone.

On the afternoon Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot, Rosalie and I were in The Smithsonian admiring Lindbergh's plane. We were all asked to leave the museum. No explanation. Outside, I found the biggest traffic jam I had ever seen in D.C. Everyone who could was getting out of town.

We walked home. The riots started that night, and we were not unhappy to see the National Guard called in. They were polite, professional, well-behaved.

Suddenly, there was a glut of very unseemly events: Kent State, Lt. Calley at My Lai, Bobby Kennedy shot. There were more protests, more heads beaten. War over. Watergate. But it's far from over, as the Kerrey controversy shows.

Or, as Paul Espel might express it: "Only the dead have seen the end of war." Paul told me he'd seen that phrase written on his Army barracks wall, signed, 'Plato.' To my knowledge, the attribution has never been verified. Maybe it was just some kid named Plato.

~ . ~

In 1965, the principal of my junior high school in Minneapolis had the teachers poll the students for a next-day response to this question: "Should President Johnson escalate the war in Vietnam?" An unprecedented and rather queer assignment, I quickly resolved the issue with my mother, a League of Women Voters official, that afternoon. My father, a veteran of Okinawa, quickly unresolved it at dinner. Their debate continued deep into the night. The politics of my household were recorded as "inconclusive."

My ambivalence persisted for five years, much of that time spent in Europe, out of broadcast range of the evening news footage of American bloodshed. Meanwhile, one brother entered a doctoral program and wound up splitting atoms at Los Alamos; the other enlisted and wound up mending body parts in Seoul. The shootings at Kent State finally brought the war home to me--and me back to it.

Only briefly though. I soon deserted again, and 'went native' while the house of my birth, familial and patrimonial, perfected its division against itself and wholly collapsed.

--MH

In this issue, we have sought--with uneven success--to represent the veterans of all stripes of the Indochina war. Phillip Mahony achieves a good deal more in From Both Sides Now, his poetry anthology featuring dozens of contributors. From the official archives to the independent Sixties Project (http://lists.village.virginia.edu/sixties), from interviews with Eugene McCarthy to profiles of Henry Kissinger, the mass of material, even just in form of personal narrative, is simply overwhelming.