Inheriting the War

by Laren McClung

  “Are you kidding me, Dad?” I asked. “What kind of music is this? Could you please turn it down? Everyone is staring at us.”

  My father didn’t pay attention. He had his hands up in the air, eyes closed, and was dancing in the car. When he saw my face, he said: “You don’t know how to understand art. I am going to collaborate with him.”

  Six months later, my father had news for me about his “collaboration” with Tan. He said Tan would write a piece of music to go with his poem “Song of Napalm,” and that the composition would be performed by the Southwest Chamber Orchestra, accompanied by Vanessa Van Anh Vo on two Vietnamese traditional instruments, dan tranh and dan bau. In addition, my father would read his poem in English and I would read the translated version by Nguyen Phan Que Mai in Vietnamese.

  I stood frozen. For the first time in my life I would have to read a poem in public—in Vietnamese—in front of an audience in a big city. What if I got so nervous that I read the wrong word in the poem? What if, all of a sudden, I forgot my Vietnamese?

  “Just find a Vietnamese professional reader to fill in for me,” I said.

  But in the end, because my father has this special power to persuade me, and because I love him, I agreed to participate.

  Only a month before my flight to Los Angeles did I begin to read the poem “Song of Napalm” in Vietnamese. I had tried to read it years ago when my father had first written it, but because I was so young and it was so complicated, I never understood it.

  I read the poem again and again, in English and in Vietnamese, but I still couldn’t understand. I only knew that the poem alluded to a famous photograph by Nick Ut, Napalm Girl. I wondered why my father alluded to that particular photograph, why he dedicated the poem to my mom, and why the poem included such intimate moments between my mother and my father.

  After speaking to my father, I understood what the poem was actually about: the consequences of war. More specifically, post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. Currently, my father suffers from seizures so bad he couldn’t go to Los Angeles to read the poem with me as originally planned. Recently, a neurologist told him that his seizures are a symptom of PTSD.

  After speaking to my father, I gained a renewed relationship to the poem that was more personal and more intimate. I imagined my father living on a pitch-black deserted island after a long war. His hand reaches for someone, anyone, like the small and fragile hands of the napalm girl, reaching out, praying for someone to come to her, to ease her burns and her overwhelming pain.

  Then my mother appears. She paints the sky blue, cuts out a bright yellow sun to glue onto the blue sky, plants trees and grass, and builds a warm nest for him. No matter how bright and colourful the island becomes, however, my mother still cannot change the truth about the war and its consequences.

  I was very nervous on the night of the performance because we had only rehearsed three times. I was worried that I would read the poem wrong and waste everyone’s hard work.

  I think I stopped breathing for a long time. My heart beat rapidly, as though I was going to pass out. But when Vanessa began playing her dan bau, all of my fears disappeared. The musical notes were clear and pure and deep, and the sky was very blue. I even heard the birds chirping.

  Then I heard footsteps, running, gunshots, and the sound of thunder roaring, and then a loud scream. I saw the girl running from her village, screaming in agony. I saw my father as a young soldier holding a mortar, aiming in her direction. I saw Vanessa plucking out human screams and cries from the dan bau string. I even saw Nick Ut preparing to snap a photograph, and I saw the orchestra and the conductor in the near distance, and then I saw composer Tan standing in silence, alone, watching.

  When I read the last verse of the poem and Vanessa plucked the final musical note on the dan bau, I exhaled a breath of relief. I couldn’t believe that the song was over. I wanted to run up to my father and Tan to tell them what I saw and felt.

  Only then did I dare to look down at the audience. They were all standing. Their applause was so loud and long that I thought it would never end. I saw some of them crying. I knew that they saw what I saw, and I wanted to believe that they felt what I felt. Finally, I could see the real power of “Song of Napalm.”

  I began to understand our relationships and why we came to meet each other; me, my father, Nick Ut, and Tan. We are all living proof of the consequences of war.

  And now in my dreams there is a world in peace, a world without war and without the sounds of bombs or gunshots. In that world, we walk together to the song of the Napalm Girl, singing to Tan’s music about the beauty of peace.

  SONG OF NAPALM

  for my wife

  After the storm, after the rain stopped pounding,

  we stood in the doorway watching horses

  walk off lazily across the pasture’s hill.

  We stared through the black screen,

  our vision altered by the distance

  so I thought I saw a mist

  kicked up around their hooves when they faded

  like cut-out horses

  away from us.

  The grass was never more blue in that light, more

  scarlet; beyond the pasture

  trees scraped their voices into the wind, branches

  crisscrossed the sky like barbed wire

  but you said they were only branches.

  Okay. The storm stopped pounding.

  I am trying to say this straight: for once

  I was sane enough to pause and breathe

  outside my wild plans and after the hard rain

  I turned my back on the old curses. I believed

  they swung finally away from me ...

  But still the branches are wire

  and thunder is the pounding mortar,

  still I close my eyes and see the girl

  running from her village, napalm

  stuck to her dress like jelly,

  her hands reaching for the no one

  who waits in waves of heat before her.

  So I can keep on living,

  so I can stay here beside you,

  I try to imagine she runs down the road and wings

  beat inside her until she rises

  above the stinking jungle and her pain

  eases, and your pain, and mine.

  But the lie swings back again.

  The lie works only as long as it takes to speak

  and the girl runs only as far

  as the napalm allows

  until her burning tendons and crackling

  muscles draw her up

  into that final position

  burning bodies so perfectly assume. Nothing

  can change that, she is burned behind my eyes

  and not your good love and not the rain-swept air

  and not the jungle green

  pasture unfolding before us can deny it.

  —Bruce Weigl

  MATTHEW WIMBERLEY grew up in the Blue Ridge Mountains. His stepfather served in the air force, where he was stationed in U-Tapao Thailand during the Vietnam War. Wimberley is the author of the chapbook “Snake Mountain Almanac” selected by Eduardo C. Corral as the winner of the 2014 Rane Arroyo Chapbook Contest from Seven Kitchens Press, and winner of the 2015 William Matthews Prize from the Asheville Poetry Review. He was selected for the 2016 Best New Poets Anthology. Wimberley was a finalist for the 2016 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award. He lives in Richmond, Virginia.

  TWO DAYS HOME

  Put out those cigarettes, boys.

  Inhale the flames

  all the burning we don’t see.

  No sleep as wind pushes

  against weeds. Are men

  out there who move closer

  with each eye blink? Or

  just monkeys and their racket

  cried toward the ocean?

  The body learns not to rest—

  to tuck bed corners, clean weapons

  slow and calm as if at any mome
nt

  a bullet couldn’t reach inside

  the safety of a chain link fence

  a few spools of barbed wire

  and undo everything.

  Put out those cigarettes, boys.

  Back state-side and alive

  air thick as a cloth bandage—

  blood-heavy mosquitos hum

  peppered spots over the glades

  among fireflies which relight.

  Two days home at dinner

  he finds himself in one quick move

  dropping his fork into a bread basket

  taking cover under a table as a police siren

  whorls in the parking lot. At night

  the ocean rolls onto the shore

  the faint echo of bombers

  somewhere above the clouds.

  A mouse in the kitchen

  boot steps on the tarmac.

  IN MY FATHER’S WORDS, 1969

  In the rain we smell wood-fires

  from villages just outside the base—

  odors of teak and mahogany

  white flowers and moth-larva

  consumed. We sleep on ammo

  in the beds of deuce and a halves,

  and when clouds break,

  night settles on the ocean

  snipers make us work by starlight.

  From the flight-deck bombers take off

  and return. Each plane lifted by eight engines

  we hear them roar over mountains and gulf.

  In the rain mongoose infiltrate

  the base, come from the jungle

  to steal food. We write letters home

  send our uniforms to the river

  to be washed clean of rain-water.

  and polish the raw-metal of machinery.

  Listen to birds, to the silence

  between missions.

  In the rain planes come back

  ghost-makers. Bombs flatten the jungle

  and we load more bombs. The air

  is jet-fuel and blurred vision. Groans

  sound from idle engines ready to burn

  until we don’t hear the sound anymore.

  In the rain we forget the rain

  even as it drums on our hooches

  clanks off metal and soaks our boots

  until we don’t wear boots.

  Neil Armstrong comes back

  to lift our spirits. All day the sun is out

  over the Gulf. While he speaks

  we load bombs behind his back,

  planes take off over his voice.

  In the rain there is death.

  Some die without knowing

  they have died, on fire

  in cratered earth,

  from the force of the blast.

  We load bombs sixty hours

  a week.

  But after the rain

  we close our eyes

  and load bombs

  in our sleep.

  KAREN SPEARS ZACHARIAS is an author/journalist and guest lecturer at Central Washington University, Ellensburg, Washington. Her work has been featured on CNN, National Public Radio, and in the New York Times. A vocal advocate for military families, Karen is a Gold Star daughter and author of the memoir After the Flag Has Been Folded (William Morrow). She served on the advisory board for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund Education Center and for the Vietnam Women’s Memorial Fund. She blogs at karenzach.com.

  THE MAN IN THE JEEP

  At first I never even noticed the jeep, what with trying to tie up the bulldog pup. Grandpa Harve was sitting in a mesh lawn chair nearby, his dead arm slung down between his legs. His good hand flicked a cigarette stub.

  “Karen you hold her,” Mama instructed over my shoulder. “Frankie, tie that in a double knot.” Daddy’s best buddy had given us a prize bulldog as a gift that day. We were all gathered outside the trailer house trying to figure out where to keep such a creature in a yard that had no grass or fence.

  We hadn’t lived at Slaughters Trailer Court in Rogersville, Tennessee, very long. It was just a dirt hill with six trailers slapped upside it. One was ours, and one belonged to Uncle Woody, Mama’s oldest brother. I’m sure given the situation Mama would have rather not lived any place named Slaughters.

  Folks often laugh when I tell them I grew up a trailer park victim. But when I drive through places like Slaughters, like Lake Forest or Crystal Valley, or any of the other trailer courts I once called home, I ache for the children who live there, and for the circumstances that led their mamas and daddies to make homes between cinder block foundations and dirt yards.

  This was late July 1966. Just like any Southern summer, the days steamed and the nights stewed. I found myself missing the ocean breezes of Oahu, where we had last lived with Daddy. We’d left the island just a month before, shortly after I finished third grade. We had family in Rogersville, where both my parents had grown up.

  “I knew the minute I saw that jeep,” Mama told me later. “There aren’t any military bases in East Tennessee.”

  I don’t remember having any premonitions myself. I was used to seeing jeeps. We had lived near military bases all my life. Fort Benning. Fort Campbell. Schofield.

  “Shelby Spears?” the soldier asked. He was clutching a white envelope. His fingers trembled.

  “Yes?” Mama replied. Her whole face went taut as she clenched her jaw. She turned and handed the pup over to Brother Frankie. Little Linda hid behind Mama, rubbing her bare toes in the dirt. “Finish tying him up,” Mama instructed.

  Then, pulling down the silver handle of the trailer door, she stepped inside. The soldier followed.

  I looked over at Grandpa Harve. His eyes were hidden behind dark sunglasses. A white straw hat shielded his drooping head. Sister Linda followed the soldier. I followed her. Frankie followed me.

  For years now, I’ve tried to remember what happened next, but it’s as if somebody threw me up against a concrete wall so violently that my brain refuses to let any of it come back to me. I suppose the pain was so intense my body just can’t endure it.

  I recall only bits. Crying. Screaming. Hollering like a dog does when a chain is twisted too tightly about its neck.

  Frankie was sitting cross-legged on the blue foam cushion that served as the trailer’s built-in couch. He pounded the wall with his fists. “Those Charlies killed my Daddy!” he screamed. “Those Charlies killed my Daddy!”

  Grasping Mama’s hand, Linda buried her face in her thigh.

  I was confused. Who was Charlie? Who was this soldier? Why was Mama crying? “What is it?” I asked. “What’s happened?”

  “Daddy’s dead!” Frankie yelled back at me, punching the wall again. “They’ve kilt our daddy! I’m gonna kill them Charlies!”

  I had never seen Mama cry before.

  Not even that December night in Hawaii when Daddy left us.

  Sister Linda was six years old and was already asleep when Daddy and Mama asked Frankie and me to come into the living room. “We need to talk,” Daddy said.

  He’d never asked us to talk before. Not officially, like he was calling together his troops or something. Mama sat real quiet beside him on the red vinyl couch. Frankie and I sat on the hardwood floor, dressed in our pajamas, ready for bed.

  “Frank, Karen,” Daddy said, “I believe you both are old enough now to understand some things.”

  I was thankful he recognized my maturity. After turning over a whole can of cooking oil on top of my head earlier that evening while helping Mama in the kitchen, I was feeling a bit insecure about my status as the family’s oldest daughter. I was nine years old.

  “You both know who President Johnson is?”

  We nodded in unison.

  Daddy continued, “There’s a country that needs our help, South Vietnam. President Johnson has asked me to go.”

  “Where’s Vietnam?” Frankie asked.

  “Whadda you gonna do there?” I asked.

  “It’s in Southeast Asia. We’ll be helping protect the c
ountry from communism.”

  Tears stung. Not because I understood what communism was, or that Daddy would be in any danger. Simply because my daddy would be leaving me.

  “Frank, you’re the man of the house now,” Daddy said. “I need you to take care of your mama and sisters.”

  “Yes, sir,” Frankie replied, his voice too steady for a boy of just eleven.

  “Karen,” Daddy said, looking directly at me, “you need to help Mama take care of Linda. Okay?”

  I nodded.

  I held my tears until after I hugged Mama and Daddy and climbed into bed. Scrunching myself between the cold wall and the edge of the mattress, I began to cry.

  A few minutes later Daddy flipped on the light. On the bed next to mine, curled into a ball like a kitten, a sleeping Linda didn’t even twitch. “Karen?”

  “Yes, sir?” I said as I wiped my nose on the back of my forearm.

  “Are you crying?”

  “Yes, sir,” I replied.

  “Why are you crying, honey?”

  “I’m scared,” I answered.

  “Scared of what?” Daddy walked over and sat down on the edge of my bed.

  “That you won’t come home!” I wailed. Like monsoon rains, powerful tears rushed forth.

  “Karen,” Daddy said, smoothing matted hair back from my wet cheeks. “I’ll come back. I promise.”

  Picking me up, he let me cry into his shoulder. He smelled of Old Spice and sweat. “But I need for you to stop your crying, okay? It upsets Mama.”

  “Okay,” I said, sucking back the last sob. I didn’t want to upset anyone.

  “G’night, Karen.”

  “G’night, Daddy. I love you.”

  “I love you too, honey.”

  He flipped off the light. Grabbing my pillow, I sought to muffle the crying that grown-ups can control but children never can.

  Daddy left early the next day, before the sun tiptoed over the horizon. He kissed me good-bye, but I barely woke in the predawn darkness.

  From Vietnam, Daddy sent pictures of barefoot children in tattered clothing. He sent Linda a Vietnamese doll wearing a red satin dress, and me one wearing yellow. Vietnamese colors for happiness and luck. And he wrote letters, promising he’d be home soon.