Dedication
day,
with the Channel 11 News anchorman moderating –
a rag-tag crowd
of camouflage and insignia,
lodge members wearing decorations and braids,
long-haired veterans in fatigue caps;
a noticeable absence of black people,
though the woman who sang
"The Star-Spangled Banner,"
"America the Beautiful,"
and "In My Life" by Paul McCartney
was black; a perhaps not-so-
surprising absence of southeast Asians,
though General Vesser generously
referred to their suffering – exceeding
any
but those whose names are written on this monument;
a large preponderance of MIA activists
of the type whom last June President Bush
told to shut up: "Don't you think
if I
thought there were people still being
held over there I wouldn't
be doing something about it?” –
their stubbornly reiterated demand
that every lost prisoner be returned,
that all still held
in Vietnamese or Laotian POW camps,
or whose bones are scattered there,
must have a final homecoming whereby
bitterness at last may be assuaged,
the missing limb quit throbbing, and we
resume our suspended lives. Whether from
some
reasonable intelligence or from
an irrational compulsion to repeat,
the cry reverberates
and will not cease
until everyone assembled here is dead.
The expected recognition speeches
for the those-without-whom on the stage –
the woman who sat on a billboard for eighteen days
to get subscriptions, the corporate owner
who finally promised enough for the project
to get off the ground, the representative
whose efforts won a state appropriation,
the Macalester College student who first saw
the advertisement for the design contest,
the architect who drew the plans
and saw them through construction –
I myself in attendance only because I know
that woman and that architect –
many others in attendance
wearing the white armband that shows
they knew one of those
whose names are written on the granite wall.
And more personal testimonials –
poems written twenty years ago,
scraps of paper left taped to the wall of names,
containing texts of stories of the dead,
stories that we remember and whose remembrance
is significant somehow. But how
can such stories matter other
than to those who knew the dead, who incidentally
themselves will soon die,
and the stories with them?
After a thousand freezing winters
and warming springs this monument
if it exists at all will be a weird puzzle,
legible names on weathered stone,
names of people who died in a war
about which much or little may be known.
Perhaps someone will understand
the allegory of the number of bricks, or know
that a pool was here that traced a map.
These stories of the dead – when they are told,
must I uncomfortably concur
and solemnly nod my head,
or may I declare
that when the power spent
in creating the order realized here,
an order wrenched from elements already
at odds with one another,
the braids and the crumpled caps,
is no longer exerted upon it,
it will immediately begin to fall to ruin,
no fragment will stand upon another,
the names and their stories will be dust,
and all hearts once capable
of remembering will be
as vacant as the spot
on which the monument now stands.
Rather than nodding solemnly should I not
laugh scornfully and turn away?
Remember –
what do I remember?
The casualty reports and President Johnson's agony
seem mythical to me today,
one a fragment out of context,
the other a bromide.
I remember a vague dread of the draft board,
a palpable nausea of green trucks
seen on the highway carrying troops.
I remember
a long-haired blond kid in Boulder,
wanted for draft evasion,
I bought a lid from once,
ducking out of sight when he spied
a cop who might recognize him.
The night Nixon launched
the Cambodia bombing
a friend and I, tripping, saw lines
of marchers blocks away,
and joining stole a trash-can lid on which we beat,
"One, two, three, four, we don't want your fucking war," and
"All we are saying is give peace a chance."
We finally seized a highway overpass,
but the police, anticipating our maneuver,
diverted traffic, and I soon grew bored,
and we hiked to the IHOP for a midnight snack.
(Not I but my friend returned, remaining
for the duration of the occupation.)
Three years later in Denver
a work-mate who had driven a tank
was eventually fired because he would
do nothing but sweep the floor–
"A guy kept asking me
"what Gene Autrey's horse's name was,
"and I just kept
"freaking out ‘cause he wouldn't tell me" –
another talked
of being shot at from a car
on his way home from a bar at night –
veterans injected
back into the mainstream of society
like a shot of methadone –
assembled here
with their resolutely disreputable look,
their battered caps and camouflage shirts,
the uniform of their dispossession –
like Native Americans in blue jeans and flannel shirts
standing at Franklin and Chicago,
or MIAs waiting in some lost jungle camp
for an impossible homecoming
on a good day, maybe, when the sun
is shining and the pumpkin soup
has been freshly boiled.
The answer comes to me
after the arrival of the F16s,
mistimed because General Westmoreland
curtailed his speech –
much as he truncated
the information he reported
to President Johnson in 1966 –
in the final testimonials
my wife and I hear with pain as we
walk away from the dedication –
utterances too personal to be repeated in a poem,
prayers spoken to the dead of old regrets,
things lost that never will be restored,
hurts that never will be assuaged,
memories that will persist till death.
The War Memorial is a considerable victory
of the personal,
admonishing
that the cost of war is terrible, both for
those who lost their lives,
and for those whose lives have been forever altered.
1992
