Bruce Weigl´s Poems on Vietnam War

“Facing it” by Yusef Komunyakaa and “Dulce et Decorum Est” by Wilfred Owen, are two powerful poems with the graphical life like images on the reality of war. It is apparent that the authors was a soldier who experienced some of the most gruesome images of World War I. In “Ducle et Decorum Est” Owen tells us about a personal experience in which he survived a chemical warfare attack. Although he survives, some of his fellow troops do not. As in “Facing It” Komunyakaa is also a soldier who has survived a war. Komunyakaa response to his war experience is deeply shaped by his visit to Lin’s memorial. Inspired by the monument, Komunyakaa confronts his conflicted feelings about Vietnam, its legacy, and even more broadly, the part race plays in

The Vietnam War that commenced on November 1, 1955, and ended on April 30, 1975, took the soldiers through a devastating experience. Many lost their lives while others maimed as the war unfolded into its full magnitude. The book Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam by Bernard Edelman presents a series of letters written by the soldiers to their loved ones and families narrating the ordeals and experiences in the Warfield. In the book, Edelman presents the narrations of over 200 letters reflecting the soldiers’ experiences on the battlefield. While the letters were written many decades ago, they hold great significance as they can mirror the periods and the contexts within which they were sent. This paper takes into account five letters from different timelines and analyzes them against the events that occurred in those periods vis a vis their significance. The conclusion will also have a personal opinion and observation regarding the book and its impacts.

The word “homecoming” is universally associated with a celebration of the returned and is linked to feelings of happiness and anticipation. Dawe however, employs this word ironically as the “homecoming” described in the poem correlates to the death and mourning of the soldiers who fought in the Vietnam War and depicts the arrival of their nameless bodies. Through establishing this irony Dawe is about to effectively capture the brutal reality of war and highlight the emotional trauma associated with its dehumanising

For countless of people today, the Vietnam war is just something from the past, but for Tim O’Brien, the Vietnam War will endlessly be with him. This one year in Vietnam changes the lives of this platoon from emotional pain, physical pain, as well as muscle pain will commence to cloud their vision. The weight of the things that they carried takes great effect on them that they have to continue to endure on this one year trip in Vietnam and remember these memories for the rest of their lives..

During times of war, it is inevitable for loss to be experienced by all. In the poems “The Black Rat” and “The Photograph” written by Iris Clayton and Peter Kocan respectively, the idea of loss is explored through an omniscient narrator recalling a soldier’s involvement in warfare. While Clayton writes of a soldier’s abrupt loss of hope and how this experience negatively affects his life, Kocan explores how the loss of a loved one affects a family sixty years later. While both poems incorporate similar techniques in imagery and narration, the time setting for each poem is different as “The Black Rat” is set in Tobruk, Libya during World War 2 and “The Photograph” is set during World War 1.

While the Vietnam War was a complex political pursuit that lasted only a few years, the impact of the war on millions of soldiers and civilians extended for many years beyond its termination. Soldiers killed or were killed; those who survived suffered from physical wounds or were plagued by PTSD from being wounded, watching their platoon mates die violently or dealing with the moral implications of their own violence on enemy fighters. Inspired by his experiences in the war, Tim O’Brien, a former soldier, wrote The Things They Carried, a collection of fictional and true war stories that embody the

The Viet Nam War has been the most reviled conflict in United States history for many reasons, but it has produced some great literature. For some reason the emotion and depredation of war kindle in some people the ability to express themselves in a way that they may not have been able to do otherwise. Movies of the time period are great, but they are not able to elicit, seeing the extremely limited time crunch, the same images and charge that a well-written book can. In writing of this war, Tim O'Brien put himself and his memories in the forefront of the experiences his characters go through, and his writing is better for it. He produced a great work of art not only because he experienced the war first hand, but because he is able to convey the lives around him in such vivid detail. He writes a group of fictional works that have a great deal of truth mixed in with them. This style of writing and certain aspects of the book are the topics of this reflective paper.

Edited by Bernard Edelman, “Dear America” is a collection of letters written by soldiers during the Vietnam War. Their letters are written to love ones back home such as parents, siblings, and spouses but they are a great depiction of the Vietnam War. The soldiers would write these letters to help keep hope alive and to keep sane. Throughout the book the letters are categorize into those who are barely arriving into the war to those who have been there a long time. The stress and anxiety grows more and more as the letters continue and the soldiers begin to contemplate their situation. I’ve learned a lot of factual things about the Vietnam War throughout my life such as how it began and what the outcome was but reading this book was the

Hundreds of bodies littered the ground. Sounds of explosions and endless gunfire filled the air. Soldiers, with their uniforms splashed in crimson, fought viciously and ruthlessly. Their main objective, which was to win the battle, took a backseat to their newfound desperation to stay alive. After all, war is not a game, especially one such as the Vietnam War. The Vietnam War claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, and left its survivors haunted by a multitude of atrocious events. Terry Erickson’s father and George Robinson, who were two fictional characters from the short stories “Stop the Sun” and “Dear America”, respectively, were veterans of the Vietnam War. The differences and similarities between Terry’s father and George Robinson are striking, and they merit rigorous scrutiny.

The collection of poems “Theater”, “Water”, and “Safe House” by Solmaz Sharif shows the varied viewpoints of how war affects the speakers and how death is all too common in the midst of warfare. The author uses a spectrum of literary techniques to enhance the experience of the reader, so we can fully grasp the severity of each speaker’s plight. All of Sharif’s poems differ in form with the use of white space and indentations in “Theater”, colons in “Water”, and a style of abecedarian using the letter S in “Safe House”. While her diverse use of forms generate different emotions from the reader, they share the same notion of how violence is problematic. Each poem has a unique outlook to the sight of war: “Theater” being in the position of a victim and an assailant of war, “Water” explaining a war mission and fatalities in terse terms, and “Safe House” as an observer of an activist against war. Sharif’s strategy to exemplify the effects of how war affects the victim and the civilian is particularly critical because mass media tends to hide the collateral damage of war and only illustrates why we should attack the “enemy”. Another approach the author uses to critique the speakers central conflicts is by arranging words from the US Department of Defense 's Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms, to concur with the message of the several ways war influences the lives of those who are unwillingly encompassed by it. Sharif uses poetry as an outlet to show the underlying tone

In “September, 1918”, Amy Lowell shows her readers an interesting and illuminating poem. That war can be an ugly time and the people that experience it often seems to live in a “broken world” (19). To fight an evil, sometimes war is needed, nonetheless it is still costly to the people living through the war. Some in a literal sense, like soldiers fighting in a war, while some in a physical sense by the world that they now see and live in. I find the poem truly interesting though, in how the author shows that even in war we can still hold onto hope for more promising days. Lowell portrays a melancholy mood throughout her poem that makes her readers thinking about war but also the hope of it being over.

Bruce Weigl is the author of over thirteen collections of poetry; he was twice awarded the Pushcart Prize and nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in poetry. After turning eighteen, Bruce Weigl, the distinguished war poet, fought in the Vietnam War for three years. His experiences in Vietnam and back home post-service led him to write his characteristics in emotional and graphic poetry. In his book entitle What Saves Us Weigl returns to Vietnam to meet those he fought in the war; he also visits South America and relates what he discovered from the war in Vietnam to the struggles there. “May” is one poem in “What Saves Us” that seems to represent the kind of sorrow that inspire

Poets frequently utilize vivid images to further depict the overall meaning of their works. The imagery in “& the War Was in Its Infancy Then,” by Maurice Emerson Decaul, conveys mental images in the reader’s mind that shows the physical damage of war with the addition of the emotional effect it has on a person. The reader can conclude the speaker is a soldier because the poem is written from a soldier’s point of view, someone who had to have been a first hand witness. The poem is about a man who is emotionally damaged due to war and has had to learn to cope with his surroundings. By use of imagery the reader gets a deeper sense of how the man felt during the war. Through the use of imagery, tone, and deeper meaning, Decaul shows us the

   Bao Ninh's The Sorrow of War is a contrapuntal reading to American literature on the Vietnam War. But rather than stand in stark contrast to Tim O' Brien's The Things They Carried, The Sorrow of War is strangely similar, yet different at the same time. From a post-colonialist standpoint, one must take in account both works to get an accurate image of the war. The Sorrow of War is an excellent counterpoint because it is truthful. Tim O' Brien writes: ". . . you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil." (O' Brien, 42) Bao Ninh succeeds in this respect. And it was for this reason that the Vietnamese

The Vietnam War was one of the greatest controversial wars that was fought. Not only was North and South Vietnam involved, but also the United States and others. A common myth is that the Vietnam War was less intense than World War II. In the Vietnam War, those wounded or killed was more than 300% higher. With South Vietnam’s lost in this war, the country today, is a communist country. The Sorrow of War is a story of a North Vietnamese soldier, Kien, during and after the war. The story illustrates how Kien goes through his life living with PTSD and having flashbacks of the war and he becomes an author. The Sorrow of the War stayed mostly true to what happened in the Vietnam War. Kien went through diseases, talked about the battles of the Vietnam War, and the effects of the war.