The
ex-Vietnam GI poet, John Buquoi, retraces his seven-year journey through wartime
Vietnam in his recently published collection of poems. He was first in Vietnam
as a soldier, 1963-65 – serving with my brother Jeff Sharlet*– and then as a
civilian as an independent contractor supporting the military mission from 1965
to 1970.
Following
his military tour as a Vietnamese linguist, John returned to the States in
April ’65. Texas was home, but a strong attraction to the exotic land he had
gotten to know soon drew him back to Southeast Asia. By midnight, Christmas ’65,
John was aboard a PanAm flight winging his way again to Vietnam. This time working
as a civilian in-country, the poet would range far and wide throughout South
Vietnam.
With his language ability, civilian employment was not a problem for John. He was soon snapped up by a large US electrical sub-contractor. The firm was under contract to a giant construction outfit that built air fields and other military facilities for America’s growing involvement in the war against Communist North Vietnam and its southern proxy, the Viet Cong, or VC.
After completing his initial contract, John signed on with Pacific Architects and Engineers and was assigned
to the staff of a former general who had retired through the revolving door to a
cushy position with the defense contractor. The poet traveled extensively throughout the embattled country, continuing apace as he subsequently became a Labor Relations manager for the Pentagon's largest defense contractor in South Vietnam. His poems look back nearly a half century to that
unforgettable time in his young life.
John’s
book of poems can be read as written one by one, or alternatively viewed as a
continuous narrative poem. Either way, the reader journeys with the poet
through a tumultuous time in the history of the 20th century.
One
of John’s first work assignments is recorded in an early poem. He and the
general visited a major military base. As an ex-GI, the poet was aware that
combat riflemen were not only in harm’s way, but lived and fought in a war not
far from the Equator under conditions of extreme difficulty and hardship.
Even
at one of his relatively sheltered postings as an intelligence operative, he
recalled many men were billeted in tents with little relief from the searing
heat and enervating humidity of tropical Asia.
However,
in the company of a general as a newly reminted civilian, the poet was able to
pass through the two-way mirror into the bifurcated world of the US military.
Travelling north from Saigon to Cu Chi, they arrived at the vast encampment of
the 25th Infantry Division – a base the size of a small city
complete with its own airfield.
Shoulder
patch 25th Inf, Tropic Lightning
Driving
through base to the quarters of the commanding general (CG), they could see the
area where the ‘grunts’, the combat troopers, were billeted:
the 11-bravos, ‘grunts’
are
tented in fetid ‘favelas’
of
rotting surplus canvas
from
Korea, world war two,
…
to endure beyond combat
the
heat, the bugs, the rats,
the
endless monsoon
and
the most inelegant
mess
chow mélange
slung
to steel trays
Moving
on to their corporate destination – to confer with the divisional CG, the poet
came upon a scene barely imaginable in his previous incarnation as a Spec-5,
roughly the equivalent of sergeant. His lines reveal the surprising contrast:
in the commanding
general’s
mess
nestled
in officer country’s
manicured,
suburban
emerald
otherworld
of
putting green lawns
and
air conditioned luxury
command
staff trailers
privacy
fenced and gated,
guarded
against the envy
and
anger of their own troops
In
that inner sanctum of the highly stratified US Army, the poet and his general
were invited to lunch – a splendid repast worthy of colonial days in French
Indochina – first cocktails, then “lobster, shrimp,
filet mignon, prime rib,” washed down with fine wine followed by
cigars all around. The poet might well have wondered – Am I still in the same
war zone?1
John
married in Vietnam, and he and his wife began a family in Saigon. For help with
the house and the infant, they hired little Miss Anh. Early one Monday morning,
Anh came to work, punctual as always, and began playing with the baby.
But
the poet noticed her quietly crying, choking back tears. She managed to say
very politely “I need to take a week off/a personal
matter/I can be back next week.”
John
replied, of course, take whatever time you need and gently asked, “is everything okay, are you okay.” Amidst
a flood of tears, Anh explained that her brother had just died and she needed
to go back to the village in the Mekong Delta to help with his children.
Sympathetically,
the poet inquired had her brother been ill or perhaps in an accident? The
weeping young woman replied:
he was just a farmer
and
he was at home
standing
in his doorway
smoking
a cigarette
drinking
coffee
looking
out at his field
watching
his children play
and
they just came
and
killed him
from
the helicopter
from
the air
with
a rocket
and
machine guns
Shocked
and saddened, John said “I am so sorry …
take whatever you need, it’s okay,” but quickly realized “it’s not ‘okay’ at all” as … “tears echo up in my own eyes/and, choked silent/in the
cold realization/of shared responsibility.”2
Another
poem mourns a company man working at a regimental base up country who had died
saving three GIs wounded by a road mine. If not for the poet’s eulogy, the man
would have been a hero unsung lost in oblivion:
If he’d been an army man
his
name would be carved on the wall
but
he was just a civilian,
a
blue collar construction guy,
working
at Blackhorse, near Xuan Loc
not
a very important job
even
for an old guy like him,
the
oldest man on Blackhorse base3
Then
came Tet ’68, the VC’s coordinated attacks on every major urban center in South
Vietnam. Like an angry volcano, the war – long raging in the jungles and mountains
– erupted, its lethal flows coursing through cities and towns. Asleep at home
in Saigon, John
woke startled
with
the neighborhood
to
the mortars,
grenades,
small arms,
machine
gun fire
and,
loudest of all,
the
eerie haunted
silences
echoing
muffled
in between
…
battle fires
in
Saigon’s
bloodiest
alley
just
barely
a
block away
From
the rooftop, the poet watched the heavy fighting below “like
picnickers/at Bull Run/ … ashamed/ embarrassed/ at our helplessness/ in our raw
exposed/impotence/as the city burned/and so, so many died/… just barely/ and
more than/those hundred/lost lives away/in this insanity/of war.”4
Saigon street fighting, Tet ‘68
The
streets and alleys of the capital awash in death, civilians too fell victim as
the poet renders the fate of neighbors in verse. An old Vietnamese woman gone
mad in protective entombment from the violence outside her door. A priest,
fearful of becoming a casualty of the fighting elsewhere, had fled to Saigon
where – as in the ancient Persian tale of Samarra -- Death found him after all,
in the form of a Katyusha rocket.
In
perhaps his finest and most memorable poetic image of the war, John was driving
on the road south of Saigon enroute toward the delta, the Mekong River Delta.
Stopping at a roadside soup stand near a large, well-tended rice paddy, the
poet attracted a small group of peasants, curious to see a lone American in
those parts, not to mention one who spoke their language.
In
the midst of the war, the countryside seemed like “an
ancient watercolor scene/as from a silken scroll” until the
crowd suddenly turned away toward the paddy berm, peering at something on the
far tree line.
Curious,
John looked over and saw “the three/dark
shadow elephant-like hulks/approaching fast abreast” – Armored
Personnel Carriers, or APCs, churning through the pristine green paddies, ugly
scars in their wake.
Rice paddies in
South Vietnam
As
the villagers watched, muttering angrily, the “amphibian
herd” closed the distance, crested the berm, one of them dragging
a cargo net. What occurred next the poet found disturbing:
cheering soldiers jump running
to
drop their netted catch
and,
as in a play, set up, laughing,
their
grim trophy-like display,
eight
bodies neatly laid in rows
along
the paddy dike
eight
dead boys, so young
eight
dead teenage boys,
forever
teens, forever dead
from
today until forever
Mounting
up, the soldiers sped away “jeering,
laughing, cheering/ …
as though their own still last tomorrows/might not ever come.”
In
an epiphany the poet foresaw
that the final victors in this
now
all American war
would
be not ‘assisted friends’
but
comrades, sisters
and
blood’s brothers
of
these eight dead
these
eight so dead
teen
guerrilla boys
at
rest on the altar berm
But
this had not yet been grasped in Saigon “where fantasies
of progress/still
sustained the war machine.”5
The
longer John worked in Vietnam during the war, the more he saw of the dark side
of US ‘assistance’ to our ally, the South Vietnamese. In a poem about an
orphanage run by Buddhist monks, the poet tells of the huge amount of rice
required daily to feed the children.
And
as rice boils, it multiplies in volume,
so, too, the orphanage
swells
in numbers
of
orphaned children
ever
since the Americans
came
to help their friends
and
set the land
so
much to fire6
Fast
forwarding to the end of the century and beyond to the new one, the last poems
in John Buquoi’s fine volume, Snapshots from the Edge of a War,
are suffused with sadness – for the
young of Vietnam, “unearned deaths before they even lived;”7 for a buddy, an old soldier, with whom he visited the Wall, “so many
so long
dead/so many;”8 and for the country his wife Kim left
behind, “older now, dazed at so much change/she
walked the Saigon of her youth.”9
Vietnam War
Memorial, Washington, DC
The poet closes his meditation on the
past reflecting on a final trip back to Vietnam, revisiting “again one’s youth/that was so shaped in that far
place.” And hence his
last lament
for those too soon
already gone who cannot go
or did not leave that never land
and, yes, for all those times long lost
but to fast fading memory
this one last memorial trip
on landscapes now but faintly dreamed
across those ancient miles of time10
The book is available in e-book, Kindle, and
hard copy.
- “tropic lightning, cu chi base,” J Buquoi, snapshots from the edge of a war (2015), 60. Quotes from the poems in the text are indicated in bold blue type.
- “monday morning, early,” Ibid, 63.
- “death and recompense,” Ibid, 69.
- “surprise,” Ibid, 74
- “on the chau thanh road,” Ibid, 89.
- “mindfulness,” Ibid, 100.
- “collateral damage,” Ibid, 117.
- “brother ghost,” Ibid, 101.
- “quanta of memory,” 115.
- “meditation on a trip back,”
Ibid, 128.
