"I sing of arms and the man." - the ghosts of war - adapted from War, Literature, and the Arts: An International Journal of the Humanities - Cover Story

Humanist, Nov-Dec, 2001 by Philip Appleman

Sterile politics, sterile world view, sterile killing fields--but, oh, what a fertile field for poets. The moral anguish that had been bypassed in World War II was an inescapable byproduct of this gratuitous adventuring, this nouveau colonialism, this aggression. By the late 1960s it seemed that all the poets in the United States were speaking and acting their outrage, individually and collectively. We wrote with furious pens, published in the newspapers, read to roaring audiences, marched in the streets in protest. Later, when Bill Ehrhart was organizing an anthology of Vietnam literature, he found over 5,000 antiwar poems.

In the end, did it make any difference? Cynics said no, but we knew better. What our country needed wasn't more politicians and their hired guns telling us the war was good for us. What we needed were passionate voices to speak out and remind ourselves of what we already knew: that war should always be a last resort, not just "politics by other means"; that our hearts could tell us truths that colonialist politicians would not; that a bully is a shameful thing, whether a person or a nation. To defend our true national honor against the lies of the politicians, we needed to make those truths traumatic, painful: to bring the war home. We needed to realize ourselves and to declare to others that (as Pogo sagely advised us at the time) the enemy was us, that every pitiful victim of this devastation was our victim. "The poetry," Wilfred Owen wrote just before he was killed, "is in the pity."

Poets, rarely in the public eye, quickly fade from attention, but they leave their traces behind. Some of my own poems are reprinted here, all of them written during or soon after the Vietnam War. Other poems, by many outraged voices, can be found in anthologies of or about the period--such as W. D. Ehrhart's Carrying the Darkness or Ehrhart and Jan Barry's Demilitarized Zones or Vince Gotera's To Those Who Have Gone Home Tired. Surveying this scene, the historian H. Bruce Franklin wrote:

   When the men in the White House and the Pentagon made the decision to send
   Americans to fight in Vietnam, they probably never gave a thought to the
   literature that might be produced by the U.S. veterans of what we now call
   the Vietnam War. How would these men have responded if someone had
   whispered in their ears that this literature would constitute one of the
   few great American achievements of that war?

So forget Homer and Milton for a while and read those anthologies--and weep. They are the black wall of the Vietnam Memorial, dripping blood. Better than any other history, they tell us what it's really like to endure--and be responsible for--a Bad War.

Philip Appleman received the Humanist Arts Award from the American Humanist Association in 1994. He served in the U.S. Army Air Corps from 1944 to 1945 and in the U.S. Merchant Marine Corps in 1946 and from 1948 to 1949. He is the author of three novels, including In the Twelfth Year of the War; a half-dozen nonfiction books, including the new third edition of the Norton Critical Edition, Darwin; and seven books of poetry, including New and Selected Poems, 1956-1996, from which the above poems are reprinted. This article is adapted from War, Literature, and the Arts: An International Journal of the Humanities.