Readings, 22 April 1999

Beth Taylor: The poet Bruce Weigl got stuck in Philadelphia; it was very frustrating. He tried to get new connections and couldn't find room. He's now on his way back to Cleveland and very upset and very sorry not to be with us here today. Um, but we are still on our feet and we have readjusted the afternoon and have a few surprises. And the other thing is that Phil needs to finish his lunch, so Tim's going to go first instead of Phil. Again, other announcements are for anyone who comes from the Boston area, I want to make sure you know about the William Joiner center for the Study of War and Social Consequences, which has ongoing collections of workshops and storytelling gatherings of Vietnam and American peace activists, combat veterans, anyone connected to the war. And I have this pamphlet with its telephone number and email for anyone who would like to see that. I'd also like to just thank the Boston Herald, who did the best coverage of this conference in Providence, Rhode Island. Anyone -- I have gotten phone calls from the Canadian Border-- apparently the Herald, however maligned it might be, has some excellent writers like Christopher Cox. Being a writer I always want to applaud good writers who have the sensitivity to write the story about the conference the way it deserved to be told. Also, yesterday someone left their notes at the vet workshop; if you recognize this tablet, want to make sure that you find it afterwards. And the other thing is that I'm going to pass around a tablet -- we're trying to gather the names of veterans who are interested in writing or in being part of groups that will talk about writing, whether or not you choose to start your writing. We gathered names yesterday at the vets' workshop, and if you didn't get your name down, please put it on here, today. So I'm just gong to pass that around. And then also outside at break -- we're going to hold a break, at the end, make sure you have a chance to look at all the books that are being sold by all the various writers here today. There's even a brand-new book, in which I have an essay on the boys I lost to Vietnam called "Friends and the Vietnam War." And we have a songwriter who just walked in, John Olivier; he is selling his tape, which has a song of the war, out there as well.

So before we begin today, I want to do a very important thing, which is to thank the groups that helped fund this very exciting conference for us, and that is the Charles K. Colver Lectureship Fund, the Brown University Faculty Lectureship Fund, the Presidents Lecture Series, the Department of English, the Watson Institute for International Studies, the Creative Writing Program, the Dean of the College, the Chaplain's Office, and generous friends of the Brown English Department. Today we're going to begin our readings about the Vietnam War with two of our soldiers; the first is Tim O'Brien, from whom we heard a wonderful lecture last night --I wish you could hear, Tim, the buzz going around campus way past midnight last night, from all corners -- philosophers, writers, students, vets, mothers. And this is the intro for Tim today; probably doesn't need to be given any longer. But anyway, Tim O'Brien served as an infantry sergeant in the Army's Americal Division near Quang Nai from 1970 to 1971. He's the prizewinning author of "The Things They Carried," which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He also has written, "If I Die in a Combat Zone (Box Me Up and Ship Me Home)," "Going After Cacciato," "Northern Lights," "In the Lake of the Woods," "The Nuclear Age," and "Tomcat in Love." His short stories have appeared in Esquire, Harper's, Atlantic, Playboy, Granta, The New Yorker, and in editions of the O. Henry prize stories, the Pushcart Prize, and Best American Short Stories. His story "The Things The Carried" was chosen for the forthcoming "Best American Short Stories of the Century," edited by John Updike. Tim O'Brien.

(applause)

Tim O'Brien: Thank you. Pleasure to be here. Each of us, this afternoon, are going to give kind of a short reading, just to introduce you to our writing, and I've chosen to read a short section, probably only fifteen minutes or so, not even twenty-five, from "The Things They Carried," and it's a story called "How to Tell a True War Story," and I'm just jumping right into the middle of it. There are things, probably, that you're not going to be able to follow in terms of the plot and so on, but I'm not much into plot anyway, so don't worry about it. Plot's not my forte, and I don't care much about it. Uh, for me, the world works by association, kind of the way poetry does, just sort of flames up and comes back. And in a way, a story operates that way.

How To Tell A True War Story

Thanks.

(applause)

Beth Taylor: Philip Caputo served as a lieutenant with the Third Marine Division near Da Nang from 1965 to 1966. He went on to become a Pulitzer Prize journalist, covering the war in Beirut, and the fall of Saigon in the Chicago Tribune. His memoirs are "A Rumor of War" and Means of Escape." His novels are "Horn of Africa," "DelCorso's Gallery," "Indian Country" and "Equation for Evil." He has written for Esquire, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, and the Los Angeles Times. He has recently finished a sea novel. Phil Caputo.

(applause)

Philip Caputo: Thank you, Beth, and thanks everybody for showing up, which Woody Allen said is ninety percent of life. Um, writers are always involved in self-promotion, Beth, so I want to say I wrote another book, also, the last one I just finished, called "Exile." Um, I get a little bit intimidated --. Tim has sort of subverted the idea of what's true, what's false, what's real and what isn't, uh, I'm going to have to say that the book I'm going to read from, "A Rumor of War," which is a memoir that I published in 1977, is a quote-unquote true war story. It's not fiction, it's not a work of imagination, except insofar as the selection of certain details and leaving out of other details was a work of the imagination. What I'm going to do, and I think the reading might take slightly longer than Tim's, is to read one excerpt from the prologue of the book to give you some idea of what my purpose was in writing it. Then I'm going to read excerpts from the chapter, I should say the part of the book, that's called "The Officer in Charge of the Dead." Um, there's a lot of stuff in thisbook about firefights, helicopters, ambushes and the sort of derring-do that you often see on television. But I kind of think that the part I'm going to read to you more closely captures the essence and the absurdity as well as the horror of the Vietnam War, rather than the part of John Wayne action stuff. So to begin with, from the prologue, and I just mention in here that, talking about after I return from Vietnam to the United States, I say:

excerpt from prologue

And now, the Officer in Charge of the Dead describes an episode during my service over there that I hope illustrates what I just read. I had been a rifle platoon commander on the line. I was then pulled off the line and back into a staff position with the regimental headquarters as an adjutant, which is an administrative position, and one of the jobs that I had was called a casualty reporting officer. And that was a rather important job, actually, over in Vietnam, where success on the battlefield was not measured as it had been in conventional wars by cities, seas or road junctions taken, or the usual measurements of conquest. The only measurement of success was a rather hideous invention called the body count and the kill ratio. The body count was the number of people that a particular unit had killed, hopefully the enemy, I say hopefully because quite often the enemy over there was not distinguishable from civilians, and the kill ratio was the proportion between the number of dead you had inflicted and the number of dead you had suffered. And I'll read excerpts from this; I won't read the entire chapter.

excerpt from Chapter 10

And then I go on to describe how I had to verify these body counts when a unit killed some enemy. Quite often, because success of a unit was dependent upon that number, some commanders in the field were tempted, and often gave into the temptation, to exaggerate the number of dead that they had inflicted, and so one of my jobs was to actually eyeball the dead. And so that is what the rest of this chapter is about, is about this incident in which four Viet Cong are killed and brought back to headquarters to be viewed by me or kept.

Beth Taylor: I have to make a commercial break, here. Tim, Tim O'Brien, I think maybe you should go into the hallway -- we have several faculty members and staff members who are members of Macalaster and have requested a photo opportunity with Macalaster graduate Tim O'Brien, at two p.m., which is now. So, maybe this is a good time for you to go find them in the hallway. There are seats up front by the way, if anybody doesn't have a seat. We're going to have one more reading and then we're going to have a break, about ten minutes, do whatever, and then we will have Yusef Komunyakaa who has joined us -- thank you, and Laura Palmer, and Jade Ngoc Quang Huynh. Right now, though, I would like to introduce to you Marilyn McMahon, who was a nurse with the Navy from 1967 to 1972. That included almost two years working with the Marine Corps war casualties in Philadelphia, and one 1969-1970 stint at Da Nang Naval Hospital. Her poems have been published in several anthologies, including in "The Vietnam War in American Stories, Songs and Poems," and in "Visions of War, Dreams of Peace." I give you Marilyn McMahon.

(applause)

Marilyn McMahon: Thank you. Another recent publication is an anthology edited by Kevin Bowen and Bruce Weigl, called "Writing Between the Lines: An Anthology on War and Social Consequences." I highly recommend it. I'm also highly honored to be in it. Well, I have -- interesting to follow both Tim and Phil. As a poet, I would like to say that I follow the themes of telling a true war story, and that is it's true if the essence is true. On the other hand, a whole lot of my poetry is, um, (???) to me. So anyway, the first piece is going to be the hardest piece to read, because I have not taken drama. Um, and it is titled "July 20, 1969: An Introduction in Three Voices," and, had I thought far enough ahead, I would have asked some of Beth's students to be -- to help me with this, but I didn't. So I'll start.

July 20, 1969: An Introduction in Three Voices

The next piece was actually writen as a piece of prose, however it got edited into poetry, and it works for me. This is a bitterly true story. "In This Land."

I was raised Catholic, first grade through college, and for any of you who have been to Catholic school, this will be pretty familiar. The title of the poem is "Confession."

Confession

The next piece is actually the first piece that was published, and it's the only piece actually I ever sent out blind to a writer's -- a similar conference to this, actually, at Cornell. It won a prize, but it wasn't the prize that got me the airplane ticket to go to Ithaca, but somebody read it there, and then they published it, so -- the title of the poem is "Wounds of War."

Wounds of War

The next piece that I'm going to read to you is the one that has been published the most. It's made it into feminist journals, and all sorts of places. The title of the poem is "Knowing," and it has an epigram. Quote, "recent research indicates dioxin is the most potent toxin ever studied." End quote. This was from an NPR news report in September 1987.

Knowing

And the last piece, um, was stimulated by news items, and is a true war story. The title of the poem is "Dying With Grace."

Dying With Grace

Thank you.

(applause)

Beth Taylor: We're going to take a seven minute break, and then we will return for Yusef and Laura and Jade --. Sign up for a veterans' writing workshop in the Rhode Island Area, but please make sure if you're a veteran that you sign it, put email on there -- and I'm encouraging Frank Grzyb to carry the ball and keep dialogue going among veterans that might choose to write. And this is Bob Griffith, a vet who has an announcement.

Bob Griffith: A lot of people -- several people yesterday talked about having letters that they had saved either from a spouse, or -- their spouse or girlfriend or family members had saved that they sent home from Vietnam. And a couple of people were wondering sort of rhetorically what to do with them. The US Army Military Institute at Carlisle Barracks, which is associated with the Army War College, has a growing archival repository of soldiers' letters from all wars. But they are also looking for any kind of donations under virtually any conditions of access that you might want to put on them. And it's very important that we donate our letters at some point. I am going to donate my letters to an archive someday, after I'm done with them, and I'm trying to convince my wife to donate the letters that I sent her as well. I've got the letters she sent me. But, the point being that when the histories get written, they tend to get written from the leadership's perspective. Whether you consider it a won or lost war, the official histories, the generals' biographies or autobiographies or something like that, it doesn't really get down to the soldiers' level very often, unless the historian has some documents, some primary source material, and ours is a generation that doesn't write letters. We use the telephone a lot, now we use email, but except for significant emotional events like wartime when we can't call home easily, we write letters. So these things become very valuable to the social historian, the individual who's trying to capture the human dimension of war. SO I would encourage you to think about that at some time in the future. We were all mesmerized with what Ken Burns did with Vietnam -- I mean the Civil War, and the letters that he drew on. It's not too much of a stretch to think that soldiers' letters from Vietnam could someday do the same thing. So if you have them, if you are thinking about donating them, please do, to the Army's Military History Institute or any research library, any library that has collections of documents, because it will be valuable to some future historian and you will be leaving a genuine legacy. Thanks.

Beth Taylor Thank you. It is a great pleasure to introduce Yusef Komunyakaa, who served from 1968 to 1971 in the U.S. Army, during which time he was Correspondence Editor for the Army newspaper, "The Southern Cross," for a year. His collections of poems are, again, "Dien Cai Dau," "Neon Vernacular," "Thieves of Paradise," "Magic City," "Copacetic," "Lost in the Bonewheel Factory," "Other Dark Horses." He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1984, and now teaches at Princeton University. Yusef Komunyakaa.

(applause)

Yusef Komunyakaa: Thank you for being here. I would like to dedicate this reading to Manny Babbitt. How many of you know about Manny? Manny Babbitt? Um, he's supposed to be executed May fourth by the state of California. Vietnam veteran. Marine Corps. There's more information -- there should be more information about that out on the table.

Camouflaging the Chimera

You and I are Disappearing

We Never Know

A Break From the Bush

Tu Do Street

Um, I went back to Vietnam in 1990 -- and in fact Phil Caputo, he was there, Bruce Weigl, a number of people -- and I began to write a poem in Hanoi. I'll share that poem. It's called "Reed Boat." We went back to Vietnam to meet with the Vietnamese Writers Union. "The Reed Boat."

The Reed Boat

Prisoners

I'll just read a few -- a couple last poems, and this one is "Thanks."

Thanks

When I came back to the states, the plane landed at Travis Air Force base, and this is pretty much a composite of the images I glanced.

To Have Danced with Death

And the last poem is "Facing It."

Facing It

(applause)

Beth Taylor: Laura Palmer has worked as a journalist in Saigon, Paris, Washington DC, New York and Los Angeles. She left for Vietnam after graduating from college in 1972 to cover the war for ABC and NBC radio news, and to write for Time and Rolling Stone magazines, including the story of leaving Saigon in the final evacuation. She was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for her syndicated column, "Welcome Home," about coming to terms with the Vietnam War, published in the New York Daily News. Her stories for the New York Times magazine include "How to Bandage a War" on combat nurses who served in Vietnam. She has written three nonfiction books including "Shrapnel in the Heart," in which she traced people who left letters and poems at the Vietnam Veterans memorial in Washington DC, and told their stories of the war from the perspective of being the family and friends and buddies of friends who died in Vietnam. She has written and produced news stories for NBC, ABC and CBS news, most recently for Nightline. Laura Palmer.

(applause)

Laura Palmer: Thank you, Beth. It's indeed both a privilege and a pleasure to be here today. In the introduction to Shrapnel in the Heart, I wrote that the flag on the coffin covered only the obvious tragedy, and this book, I'm trying to give light and voice to some of the rest. The first selection I'm going to read today is a poem written by a woman who was a nurse in Vietnam, whose nickname is Dusty. She's the daughter of a survivor of Auschwitz; she went to Vietnam when she was nineteen and did two tours of duty there. I interviewed her on Yom Kippur. When I interviewed her, she was married to a man who had no idea his wife had ever been a nurse, ever been in the Army, or, of course, ever been in Vietnam. She said to me that:

"Vietnam cost her a great deal: a marriage, two babies, the ability to bear healthy children, the ability to practice her profession, her physical health, and at times, her emotional stability. After the weight of my postwar trauma reached a critical mass, I changed my name, my profession, my residence, and my past.

Hello David

Eleanor Wimbish was the mother of Billy Stocks, who died in 1969. He was with the 23rd infantry division. She left many letters to him at the wall, she would leave a picture there. And I think her voice, for me, became the voice of every mother.

Bob Kalsu was the only pro football player who died in Vietnam. He was -- had been in ROTC at the University of Oklahoma, and he played for a season with the Buffalo Bills. He was on the same team as Jack Kemp. When he was called up, he could have gotten out of it, but he simply didn't think it would be right, and so he went to Vietnam. He was married then and had a daughter. He was killed on his wife's due date -- she was pregnant -- and she was convinced that he was thinking the chopper might be bringing him news of the birth, the Red Cross chopper. His son wrote a poem called "Why God," and it goes like this. His son was named Bob Junior.

The son's trauma had been just that: how could my father love me, if he didn't know I was born? Fifteen years after his dad died, his mother went to the bank, and she was rummaging through a safe deposit box, and she happened upon a tape that her husband had sent from Vietnam. And she took it home and she played it, and Bob Kalsu, at the end of the tape, spoke to his unborn child, and said simply, "Baby K, I just want you to know that Daddy loves you and I'll be home soon." His son took the tape -- his mother told me -- he took it in his bedroom, listened to it for a week, and he practiced the inflection of his fathers voice. I think what strikes me about that story is that healing is so mysterious and so unexpected that even when we think there's never a chance it's somehow never too late.

Carol Paige wrote a letter that I think is, perhaps, the one that says -- it's complete, it talks about pain, it talks about loss, but it talks about healing, and it was written to Ricky Waldron, who was also with the twenty-fifth infantry division, killed October 25th, nineteen sixty-eight.

Letter by Carole Ann Paige

I want to conclude my reading with something from the introduction to the book.

excerpt from Introduction

Beth Taylor: [One of Bruce Weigl's most searing poems is "Song of Napalm."] I'm not going to try to read his poem. I'm going to ask you to buy "From Both Sides Now", but juxtaposed with it, for very good reason, is a poem written, I find out, by a neighbor of ours here at Brown -- Jackie Loring. And I asked her today to come up and read it, this poem called "Curse the Rainbow," and -- Jackie Loring?

(applause)

Jackie Loring: Thank you very much. This poem is dedicated to my husband Gary. We'll be married thirty years in July, and to Bruce Weigl, who was the inspiration for it, and to all of the veterans who served in country. The name of the poem is "Curse the Rainbow."

Curse The Rainbow

Beth Taylor: It's now my privilege to introduce Jade Ngoc Quang Huynh, who survived growing up during the war in Vietnam, and became a university student in nineteen seveny-four. But as an intellectual, he was then sent to labor camps for education in Communist ideology, psychological and physical retraining. He escaped in nineteen seventy-seven, first to Thailand, then to the US, he spent six years working at fast food restaurants, cleaning bathrooms, washing dishes, and working in factories. He received his BA degree from Bennington College in nineteen eighty-seven, and his MFA from Brown University in nineteen ninety-two. He is the author of "South Wind Changing," the memoir of his family torn apart by the war, his surviving the brutality of prison camp, his repeated attempts to escape the country, and his struggle to resettle in the United States. He now lives in Bennington, Vermont, and with an NEA grant, is working on several books. Jade, it's a pleasure to have you back here.

Jade Ngoc Quang Huynh: Thank you. I think it's appropriate for me to recite a song or a poem or something at the end of this reading today, so you can sense what the Vietnamese language sounds like, because we talk about Dien Cai Dau, we talk about Quang Nai, we talk about Da Nang, we talk about Chu Lai, but you have no idea what it sound like. So I try to recite that kind of language before, at the end of this reading. I'm going to read you -- I'm a boat person, and I have been living in this country for twenty-one years already, and I'm still on the boat. I don't know if you're familiar with the term boat person -- that's the whole point. So I'm going to read a chapter of my memoir, then. After I escape out of the labor camp, I tried to escape out of the country, and many times. But I didn't succeeded. And this time the government boat caught us, and towed our boat back to shore, so I know I'm going to end up in the labor camp or be on the execution, or jail, or something, something. So I jump off the boat and then spend several hours in the water in the darkness. So this is what end up happening after this.

Chapters 11 & 12

And then I did escape again, and years later, I end up at Bennington College. So this is the part when I was there.

PP. 303-end

And as I mentioned earlier, I'm going to recite you a song. And this song represent the life of the Vietnamese boat people. And I'm going to read it in English, first, and then Vietnamese translation afterwards. English first and then Vietnamese. The title of the song is "A Small Gift for my Homeland," but to you it doesn't mean anything. So I, you know, personally take it another step, small to me, like many other Vietnamese boat people, so I change it to "Gifts for my Family," and it's written by a Vietnamese songwriter -- Viet Dzung. So here's the song:

Gifts for my Family, in English

Gifts for my Family, in Vietnamese

Thank you.

(applause)

Beth Taylor: I just wanted you to know that the calligraphy on our poster Jade created as part of a large calligraphy as a thank-you to the MFA program, here -- specifically to Gale Nelson, when he left the program. We did not know all of the meanings of the calligraphy when we were trying to choose one from many of the characters. Maybe he-

Jade Ngoc Quang Huynh:It's really different -- each character have different meaning, so it's hard to be in the context of the whole--

Beth Taylor: Finally when we found another graduate student who was able to help us translate, he said, "Well, this one I know is lotus, in water, with a sense of healing and purity," so we said, "That's the one, we'll take that." And your grandfather taught you the calligraphy near the temple?

Jade Ngoc Quang Huynh: Yeah.

Beth Taylor: You have to read the book for those first chapters, establishing Jade as he describes going to the temple with his grandfather, saying that your grandfather taught you the ancient Chinese scripts.

Jade Ngoc Quang Huynh: Yeah, I'm learning. I tried to -- these character is because the Chinese dominated Vietnam for thousands of years, and eighteenth century-- in eighteenth century, the Vietnamese tried to detach away from the Chinese, so they used the Chinese characters to improvise for the Vietnamese language. So many of the Chinese cannot read the Vietnamese characters, but the Vietnamese can read the Chinese characters. There's a long, long history of the language.

Beth Taylor: I also want to mention that when I went to South Providence to find this quilt -- a Hmong woman, Mai Mua, I discovered that her (daughter) was translating (for) her, for Mai, was a classmate of my son's at Classical. So that daughter and their friends of Classical and some South Vietnamese are going to join the South Vietnamese workshop tomorrow that Jade is going to facilitate -- another round of students and friends and regional Southeast Asians. They'll be encouraging each other to tell the stories of their families. And I have cards for May Mua's quiltwork. This is her story of leaving Laos and all the way through various obstacles in the journey, all the way to Providence, and she says the TV is Providence. With that, thank you very much.