A Soldier Speaks of His Generation
(Lifted from New American Writing, Volume 23)
The day we’re leaving,
the
doors of the passenger train openly wide.
There’s no longer a reason for secrets.
The soldiers young as bamboo shoots
playfully stick their heads from the windows.
The soldiers young as bamboo shoots,
with army uniforms too large for them,
crowd together like tree leaves on the stairs of
the cars.
The train whistles too loudly
And too long, as if broken,
like the voice of a teen who nearly has his man’s
voice now.
In our generation,
that train whistle is a declaration.
The generation in which each day is a
battle,
its mission heavier than the barrel of
mortar 82
that we carry on our shoulders.
The generation that never sleeps,
that goes half naked and patiently digs
trenches,
that is naked and calm in its thinking,
that goes on its way as our past has gone,
by ways various and new.
There are forest trees on which names
are quickly engraved.
The canteens are engraved with the letters “N” and “T.”
Each backpack contains a uniform,
some dried fish sauce, and a small lump
of steamed rice.
The camp’s wood stoves flame on the
stone bank of a creek,
above which hang tall cans of sour soup
made from Giang leaves and shrimp sauce.
What we have,
we share,
share on the ground
completely.
To enemies, we spend all we have in battle.
To friends, we give until all we have is gone.
If you see that our skins are black from the sun,
our misshapen bodies seem older than they are,
and you can count the calluses on our hands
along with the war medals, yet nothing quite describes
us.
Oh, the clearing in Dau forest with its dry, curved
leaves!
Every footstep crackles like a human voice.
In the night as we march,
several fires suddenly flare on the trail,
our generation with fire in our hearts
to light the way to our goal.
One night when rain lashes on all four sides,
we’re in Thap Muoi with no tree to hide us.
As the swamp floods, we have to push our boats against
the rising tide.
The horizon lies behind whoever drags himself ahead,
Silhouetted by the flash of lightning.
Our generation has never slept, walks every night
in the flood.
Mud covers us thickly from head to foot.
So our voices are those of cowboys,
and our gazes are sharp as a thorn,
because the fire that can burn in a bog is the true
fire.
When it flames up,
it burns with all of its strength.
What do you want to tell me in the hazy night, Quoc,
as you sing passionately the whole flood season?
The Dien Dien flower raises its hot yellow petals
like the face of a hand that sunlight lands and stays
on.
Our country comes from our hearts, simply,
Like this Thap Muoi that doesn’t need
making up
and is completely silent.
Stronger than any falling in love, this love goes directly
to any person
who doesn’t care about the limits of language.
Unexpectedly, I meet my close friend again.
We both lie down on a My Long trail,
on an army coat under the dark sky,
where just this evening a B-52 harrowed the earth
three times,
where for several years the bomb craters are uncountable,
where I suddenly speak a simple dream:
“When peace truly comes,
I will go to trail number four, spread out a coat
and lie down
completely satisfied.”
My friend gazes
at a star rising from a water-filled crater.
His eyes look so strange; I see
they contain both the star and the crater . . .
A vortex spins on the roof of an ancient forest.
The wind whistles a long time inside the empty shells
of trees.
The bats flicker in and out of sight.
A flattened space in the cane grass smolders.
We have passed the limits of the dry season,
passed the rainy season, the long limits of the rainy
season
when every night our soaked hammocks hang on Tram poles.
Our boats move across the river under the faint flares
of the American army.
Sometimes, in awe of the skyline filled with red
clouds at evening,
we forget we are older than our real ages.
Our feet walk in rubber sandals across a hundred
mountains,
but our shadows never walk ahead of our futures.
The battles of the past come again in memory.
Rockets exploded in air in a mass of smoke.
Our hearts beat nervously in our very first fight.
Our army-issue canteens smelled as they burned
on the roofs of the trenches.
And the garbage cans lay strewn all around.
In the silence and deafness between two bombings,
a hen’s voice suddenly called
from a small, ruined canal.
Our generation has never lived on memory
so we never rely on the past’s radiance.
Our souls are fresh as Chuong wind,
our sky the natural blue of a sunlit day.
The transport boats sail the crowded Bang
Lang canal.
That evening rockets attacked,
bending down the Binh Bat trees.
Sunset covers both banks like blood.
The canal is white from the flow of toxic
gases.
Suddenly I see my face on the water’s surface,
among those poisonous mists,
on which floats the Binh Bat fruit,
on which floats our breaking country,
and I see
also floating the faces of many people,
some of them friends and some I have never
seen.
They are so very young
as they flicker along on the stream
into a faraway meadow
on an endless evening.
They’re the people who came first
twenty years ago as one generation
and also the ones who will come later,
twenty years from today.
That evening
on the small canal
artillery attacks and flowing water.
How clearly you can see
the faces of
our generation!
1973
Note: This poem was very controversial in Vietnam after it was published in Hanoi’s largest literary review, Van Nghe, and was prohibited to the public by the government until 1988, when Vietnam reconstructed its economy and politics.Giang is a wild vegetable, sour to the taste that
North Vietnamese soldiers used in soup.
Dau is a very common tree in the forests
of Southwest Vietnam.
Thap Muoi is a swamp where one of the largest
North Vietnamese army camps was located.
Quoc is a nocturnal bird that sings “quoc,
quoc, quoc,” which also means “country.”
Dien Dien is the name of a wild flower.
My Long and Binh
Bat are names of trees common
in Thap Muoi swamp.
Chuong is a kind of Southwest wind.