Learning War
It could be argued that Vietnam was the first ever ‘real time’ war with, thanks to the development of television technology, the conflict coming directly to the TV screens of the Baby Boomer generation. As R.L. Barth puts it: ‘body counts [were] served alongside the evening meal.’
Due to this immediacy, ‘the war’ became one of the most culturally important defining points of the modern world, dividing the US – and the Western world generally - between ‘hawks’ and ‘hippies’, between ‘patriots’ and ‘peaceniks’, with the battle being joined (bloodlessly) on all fronts – music, film, television, the traditional print media, novels, short stories. ‘Vietnam’ – the reaction, not just the war itself -- was arguably the first shot of today’s ongoing culture wars.
But for soldiers actually fighting the war on the ground, their concerns were both more universal and particular: death and the fear of death, the camaraderie of circumstance and despair, the first witnessing of horror almost beyond imagining, a suspicion that those behind the lines had no idea what daily existence on the front was like. Whether it was the gap at Thermopylae, the dark forests of Tuetoberg, the fields of Waterloo, the ridges of Gettysburg, the ruined streets of Stalingrad or the trenches of the Somme, the soldiers’ experience of war was not fodder for political debate and media point scoring .It was just there. It is always just there.
The Vietnam War was, therefore, both universal and unique. It was, like all wars, bitter and complex. It was a war between armies -- be it those of communist North Vietnam or those of the western-supporting state of South Vietnam, along with the region’s original imperial power, France, and, following French collapse, increasingly those of the United States, until the final capitulation of the South Vietnamese regime in 1975. It was also a vicious civil and guerrilla war, a war with no rules where it was hard to tell friend from foe, a war almost beyond moral limits. Between the war’s beginning in 1955 and its conclusion twenty years later, three million died. Of those, 58,000 fatalities were those of US forces.
Why, though, do we need to know about the events of a war, that was as well as being over half-a-century ago, also took place in a land far from our own? The poet R.L. Barth, who served in Vietnam as a Marine, writes of the importance for us to know the events of the war now – despite the wealth of information already out there – because not only is it history, but it is also truth. One way that we experience the ‘truth’ of the war is through poetry. In the introduction to Learning War, Warren Hope writes extensively about the techniques that Barth employs throughout his poetry. Despite the short length of Barth’s poems, we are able to encounter snippets of the Vietnam War through the poems that he writes – often in ways that will surprise you.
If you wish to find out more, Barth’s stunning book, Learning War: Selected Vietnam War Poems, with an introduction by Warren Hope, is available to purchase here; it is a buy that is guaranteed to stay with you long after you turn the last page.