Playing Basketball with the Viet Cong.The author served in the Vietnam war Vietnam War, conflict in Southeast Asia, primarily fought in South Vietnam between government forces aided by the United States and guerrilla forces aided by North Vietnam. during 1968 and 1969, and in this work, he wrestles with his experience then and the emotions he felt upon returning to Vietnam in the 1980s. "First Casualty" (great title!) is only twenty short lines long, but it haunts. The narrator NARRATOR. A pleader who draws narrs serviens narrator, a sergeant at law. Fleta, 1. 2, c. 37. Obsolete. starts simply enough: "They carried him slowly/down the hill." One soldier said, "Don't mean nothing." But the narrator disagrees: I swear he followed us his soul, a surplice trailing the jungle floor. In "Body Count: The Dead at Tay Ninh Tay Ninh (tā nĭn), city, S Vietnam, NW of Ho Chi Minh City. It is the center of the Cao Dai, a politically active religious group that was suppressed by South Vietnamese forces after an armed insurrection in 1955. ," Bowen uses even a sparer, more matter-of-fact style to depict the grotesque. The poem begins: We had no place to put them so we piled them, boots pointed to the sky, by the mess tent. By the end of the day, the morbid scene grew even more macabre ma·ca·bre adj. 1. Suggesting the horror of death and decay; gruesome: macabre tales of war and plague in the Middle Ages. See Synonyms at ghastly. 2. , as incoming bodies were charred "black and crisp." Right after that description, the poem ends with this: "Dawn, we flew them out in bags/mopped up the mess for chow." Most of the poems are not about the gore. Some poems are quieter, some less urgent, some are filled with reconciliation, but they are all informed by Bowen's reflective sensibility, and they are all etched etch v. etched, etch·ing, etch·es v.tr. 1. a. To cut into the surface of (glass, for example) by the action of acid. b. with precision and grace. |
|
||||||||||||||||||
Printer friendly
Cite/link
Email
Feedback
Reader Opinion