Lifting The Darkness

Among the two million and more young men who went to Vietnam as soldiers, those dozens who came home to write about the Vietnam War evolved a poetry which deserves to be better known-allied to, but distinctively different from other anti-war poetry of the time. This piece considers the fact that American soldier poetry was not merely dedicated to battle and battlefield fraternity, but was emblematic of a frequently ambivalent engagement with the enemy and with the Vietnamese civilian population. Because the poems are their own best witness, I quote freely from combat veterans Doug Anderson, W.D. Ehrhart, Yusef Komunyakaa, Bruce Weigl, and others, choosing to look more at those with recognizable literary merit and at those for whom the flow of poetry did not dry up after one or two books. I also include the category-defying poetry of John Balaban-a conscientious objector who went straight to the heart of conflict for a term of engagement equal in exposure and intensity to that of the other poets I discuss. I will be looking at Vietnam War poetry both before and after 2003, narrowing my focus to a small group of poets whose war experience, full of guilt and regret, led them to a post-war body of work expressing an extraordinary subsequent interest in the country of their former enemy, and in its art, culture, and people. This move was new, and not duplicated by other generations of war poets

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