Remember by Roger Raepple

Remember (Brilliant Press, 76 pp. $45) by the photographer Roger Raepple is a vivid collection of photography and verse honoring those who paid the ultimate price while serving in our nation’s military. It’s a beautifully produced coffee-table book with 32 photo plates, some on extended fold-out pages. Most are accompanied by a few lines of prose or poetry. Most of the images are of grave markers, war monuments, and statuary. Raepple served in the U.S. Army in the mid-1960s.

On one page there’s the line from Frederic Weatherly’s “Danny Boy” that reads, “I shall sleep in peace.” It begs to be compared to Mary Elizabeth Frye’s poem a few pages before, “Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep,” with its famous lines:

I am not there I do not sleep.

I am a thousand winds that blow.

I am the diamond glints on snow.

I am the sunlight on ripened grain.

I am the gentle Autumn rain.

Accompanying a photograph of the Faces of War Memorial in Roswell, Georgia, are these lines from a poem by Michael O’Donnell:

I kicked up the stones

Along the alley way behind the house

And tapped a stick I found

To no familiar rhyme …

I was not going to think about you …

You were all I thought about. …

Alongside a truly stunning photo of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., Raepple writes, “If one place can evoke every emotion, this place can: anguish, contempt, remorse, bitterness, hatred, love, betrayal, fondness, warmth, forgiveness.”

A nice surprise for me was the inclusion of the complete lyrics of the song “Boxes” by my good friend, the Texas singer-songwriter Sam Baker. In “Boxes” Baker writes that among the keepsakes a woman has held onto for many years—photographs, trophies, and drawings—is a letter informing her, “Your first lieutenant is not coming back.” The book also contains poems by Raepple, Morgan Ray, Josephine Pino, and others.

Among the photographs are Raepple’s images of the “Three Servicemen” statue at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. (below), the U.S. Marine Corps War Memorial (aka the Iwo Jima Memorial) in Arlington, Virginia, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery, and the Vietnam Women’s Memorial in D.C.

Facing the page with a photograph of the “Follow Me” statue at the National Infantry Museum and Soldier Center at Fort Benning is the famed World War I poet Siegfried Sassoon’s “Suicide in the Trenches,” with its blistering final stanza:

You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye

Who cheer when soldier lads march by,

Sneak home and pray you’ll never know

The hell where youth and laughter go.

A second poem by Michael O’Donnell, written a few months before he was killed in action in Vietnam, includes the following lines:

And in that time

When men decide and feel safe

To call the war insane,

Take one moment to embrace

Those gentle heroes

You left behind …

This book encourages—indeed, insists—on such remembrances. Remember would make a great gift. I hope this book gets picked up by libraries, and believe it would also fit well in waiting-room areas of offices dedicated to helping veterans and their families.

The book’s website is remember-vets.com

–Bill McCloud

Tramping Solo by Fred Rosenblum

Fred Rosenblum’s new book of poetry, Tramping Solo (Fomite Press, 84 pp. $15, paper; $4.99, Kindle), would fit neatly into a backpacker’s pouch—physically, emotionally, and mystically. The book contains 35 poems averaging 50 lines each. That’s mid-length poetry, which should make for comfortable reading for most people. These verse are comfortable, that is, until you get to the subject matter.

The poems cover a three-year period in which Rosenblum—who spent 1968 as a U.S. Marine in South Vietnam—was out of the military and hitchhiking up and down the Pacific Coast from California to Alaska. He used that time to hide out from his past while also trying to deal with it. The poems’ titles include “The City Snarled,” “Jamming With Dead Russians,” Mending Seine,” “Sundown Jungle Texarkana,” and “Under a Bridge in the Pouring Rain.”

Dreaming of “a Londonesque sketch/of adventure,” Rosenblum trades Southeast Alaska and its adventures for those he had had in Southeast Asia. He refers to the journey as “the period of jazz cigarettes and psychedelia.”

He remembers times in Vietnam when he was as “fatigued as/Jesus ascending Golgotha.” Then he recalls:

“the piss yourself

apprehension of the firefight

rainforest mist.”

“The sweltering, sulfuric air

held the steaming metallic stench

of blood and evacuation,

married to the jungle’s rotted

respirations of floral decay.”

Then the truly unforgettable sounds and smells of “nightfall’s napalm raining.”

“ – those silver satanic angels

with their ravaging

Phantom strikes, to this

very day still strafe me,

deep into the stygian abyss

of my sleepless nights.”

In “Enamored of the Art,” Rosenblum writes that he’d been drawn to Alaska by its:

“Klondike-like affect,

home of restless longings

 — a white fang wealth of yearning

churning in my chest.”

A lot of this is bare-chested, big-muscled adventure writing as Rosenblum reports on traveling through areas where bears outnumber people and works in a pulp mill and on commercial fishing boats with rag-tag crews for his “paltry share of the take.” He also travels the American Southwest on a Greyhound Bus noting:

“The thick,

acrid air of perspiration

and flatulence

permeated the scenic cruiser.”

This is outdoorsy stuff. It’s not an accident that, along with Jack London, we get mentions of Woody Guthrie, Jack Kerouac, and Sonny Barger of the Hell’s Angels.

Don’t be overly concerned by the fact that this book is presented as poetry. The poems serve as the launching pad for Fred Rosenblum’s memories and the stories they have turned into.

Drop the book into your pack the next time you’re going to spend some time in the great outdoors. It’s there that you’ll enjoy the companionship of these poems most.

–Bill McCloud

Learning War by R. L. Barth

R. L. Barth’s Learning War: Selected Vietnam War Poems (Broadstone Book, 72 pp. $18.95, paper) is a powerful collection of poetry based on Barth’s experience with the Marines during the war. This book brings together poems from a half dozen of Barth’s previous collections. He is also the author of No Turning Back: The Battle of Dien Bien Phu (2016), a group of poems related to that seminal battle in the French Indochina War.

The 74 short poems included here—some epigrams, some couplets—average a mere eight lines each. But that’s enough to get the job done.

The book is divided into three sections with titles such as “A Child Accidentally Napalmed,” “A Letter to the Dead,” “One Way to Carry the Dead,” “Don’t You Know Your Poems Are Hurtful?,” and “Tonight You Bitch …” A handful of poems appear as though they were written from a War, a Staging Area, the Bush, an Observation Post: Near An Hoa, and the World.

Here are three complete poems.

“War Debt”

Survive or die, war holds one truth:

Marine, you will not have a youth.

“Initial Confusion”

A sergeant barked, “Your ass is Uncle’s!” though

It wasn’t clear if he meant Sam or Ho.”

“Epitaph” 

Tell them quite simply that we died

Thirsty, betrayed, and terrified.

In another poem Barth uses the phrase, “War’s war,” and then we find ourselves sharing a World War I trench with the British poet Siegfried Sassoon. These are poems of the infantry. Fighting takes place under a “leech-black sky.” Life and death decisions are sometimes based on a roll of the dice.

The troops deploy. Above the stars

Wheel over mankind’s little wars.

If there’s a deity, it’s Mars.

Patrolling silently,

He knows how men will die

In jungles. I am he.

He is not I.

At night, such lovely ways to kill, to die.

Even suppose a man is brave one time –

Is truly brave, I mean – will he be brave

A second time?

Two poems that could have served as bookends for this collection are these:

“Saigon: 16 VI. 1963”

In chaos, judgement took on form and name:

The lotus flared; more men burned in your just flame.

“Saigon: 30 IV. 1975”

We lie here, trampled in the rout,

There was no razor’s edge, no doubt.

Though the poems are short, I suggest not to read them quickly and then move on. This is not a book to be rushed through.

Read a poem, then read it again. Give it your full attention. There are things to be learned in these short poems, things to never be forgotten.

Read ‘em and weep.

–Bill McCloud

Everyday Mojo Songs of Earth by Yusef Komunyakaa

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa’s new book, Everyday Mojo Songs of Earth: New and Selected Poems, 2001-2021 (Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 288 pp. $35, hardcover; $16.99 (Kindle), contains a dozen new poems and more than a hundred from his five previous volumes with the same publisher. It does not include any of his classic work published by Wesleyan University Press, such as Dien Cai Dau (1988), his book of Vietnam War poetry, or Neon Vernacular, which received the Pulitzer Prize in 1993.

Komunyakaa is an Army veteran of the Vietnam War. He received an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of California, Irvine, and teaches at New York University. War as part of the human experience continues to be a major theme in his poetry. But Komunyakaa is no longer writing about the Vietnam War; he is now considering war throughout all of time, from the prehistoric years to the present—and beyond.

He dedicates this new collection to his daughters and granddaughter, who receive a reference in the first poem. When that poem mentions “Lucy,” we realize we’ve been taken back to the Australopithecus beginnings of human existence.

In the early poems Komunyakaa writes about working in the fields, “unearthing what we live to eat.” There are “Lessons of earth,” a mention of “the first tongue,” and “storytellers drunk on grog.” Then, quickly, there are blues to be played and highways to be walked.

We were young as condom-balloons

flowering crab apple trees in double bloom

& had a world of baleful hopes & breath

A reoccurring theme is the sense that life is a race to try and get as much done as possible before the end comes and we meet the maggots. In “Ode to the Maggot,” for example, we read: “no one gets to heaven/Without going through you first.” We encounter the use of torture in the human experience, but there also is desire—and nymphs and sex organs, real and manufactured.

The line “I deal in cosmic stuff” follows others about jazz greats sniffing gasoline and Sylvia Plath’s head going into her oven. Those and other tragedies abound in these verses—including the failings of the human body, mutilations, and massacres.

There are lines clearly aimed at engaging with the reader, such as: “The day opened like a/geisha’s pearl fan”, “How did the evening star/fall into that room?” and “Her skin is now a lost map.”

Komunyakaa

In “The Towers” the words are printed on the page in such a way as to resemble the actual Twin Towers on that fateful day in 2001. The poem mentions people writing e-mails, dead cellphones, exploding windows and, finally, search dogs.

He also writes of “flirtatious mermaids,” people who are “born to teach horses to dance,” and “late April kisses.”

Yusef Komunyakaa is known for his use of the ampersand in his poetry instead of the word “and” as a stylistic decision to move a poem ahead at a slightly faster pace. Its use is a point of minor controversy among contemporary poets.

Some of Komunyakaa’s work is considered to be difficult to understand, but I’ve found that it’s best to relax and read every word and, subliminally, you’ll understand more than you think.

It’s poetry you feel in your bones before it gets to your heart or brain. It goes deep and stays with you. Komunyakaa is a master.

–Bill McCloud

Agent Orange Roundup by Sandy Scull & Brent MacKinnon

Agent Orange Roundup: Living with a Foot in Two Worlds (Bookstand Publishing, 210 pp. $24.95, hardcover; $15.95, paper; $4.99, Kindle), by Sandy Scull and Brent MacKinnon, is a unique, poetic condemnation of the massive use of defoliants and herbicides by the United States during the war in Vietnam. It is also an educational resource to help people learn more about the development, use, and devastating effects of Agent Orange. Along with poetry, the book contains artwork, stories, and essays.

Scull and MacKinnon served with the Marines during the war; they first met in 1988. They both have received Stage 4 cancer diagnoses that they believe are associated with being exposed to Agent Orange in Vietnam.

The first part of the book consists of poems by Scull, including this couplet:

“We return to you with a souvenir

 Of present and future Death”

He goes on to describes AO as “the round we didn’t hear, and it is killing us.”

He says that today, “I like my steak tartar/shrapnel-cut and raw –” and refers to war as a “big bang without the theory.”

Here’s more:

“When memory of war joins a poem, it’s more

than a blood trail, it has a voice and is free

to move with and punctuate its own rhythm.

Those imprinted lines of sacrifice now curve.”

Scull writes that he arrived in Vietnam with a “dread of what would come.” Here’s what he says about the American military’s policy of war by body count:

“This number game had faces.

My face. And mothers. My mother.”

At one point, he’s running to catch a plane leaving Khe Sanh, “wondering how many/rotting Marines want into my jungle boots leaving.” He also questions “How much blood can this soil absorb?”

We learn from Scull that when you smash your M-16 against a tree out of grief for five men lost to rifle jams, it comes apart this way: “The plastic butt stock shattered first, then the hand guard, the trigger and rear sight.”

MacKinnon begins his part of the book by declaring: “These poems and prose are by two combat Marines sentenced to slow death by the country who sent us in harm’s way.”

One of his poems mentions those who are “soon to die,” “already dead,” and “almost dead.”

He cries out to the U.S. government: “I don’t want money. Just say you did It/Say you killed me with Agent Orange/say you did it.”

Scull and MacKinnon (Lt. Scull and Cpl. Mac) bring the reader right into the poem-writing process with a line like, “You say, cut this last stanza –” and a title such as, “These Are Not Your Poems!”

There are poems here that deal with receiving cancer treatments and living with cancer. Scull sums things up beautifully when he says: “Though the subject matter of these poems may seem like a downer, my hope is that the human spirit of love and connection bleeds through.”

Overall, this is a strong collection of material written by two war veterans who have made a pact with their readers that they are going to go out fighting.

–Bill McCloud

It Looks Like What I’ll Take to My Grave by Emerson Gilmore

Emerson Gilmore’s book of Vietnam War poetry, It Looks Like What I’ll Take to My Grave: Viet Nam Fifty Years Later, a Memoir in Verse (106 pp. $15.99, paper; $2.99, Kindle), moves beyond the borders of the war to consider the effects of armed conflict in general and the unfortunate fact that war is apparently a consistent part of human existence.

Gilmore served in the U.S. Army in Vietnam from January 1970-February 1971 as an interpreter and interrogator. The book’s title refers to the fact that his war memories will stay with him for his entire life.

The book gets off to a great start with the first line of the first poem: “None of us was meant/to war.” Gilmore writes that Basic Training at Ft. Jackson taught him how to “guard empty buildings/with empty rifles.”

On his way to Vietnam, he writes, “I stopped in to fill my stomach with beer,/drank for nearly a year/and landed in Bien Hoa, Vietnam.” That was not Gilmore’s last beer, as he admits, “I drank the war.”

He also tells us through his poetry that he “never fired or was fired upon” and he spent much of his time in “the clubs of Saigon/where the whores/knew my name.” Gilmore sometimes writes disparagingly about street prostitutes calling out offers of sex, “Their breath tainted with rat and dog.”

There’s a great poem about both sides during the war singing “the ageless G.I. blues,” with a nod to the 1960 Elvis Presley song and the lyrics to a similar song in James Jones’ great World War II novel, From Here to Eternity, as well as the Hollywood movie version of the book.

Gilmore’s poetry gives us much to think about. Such as: “I will never fight another war/even if God says.” And:

“History without wars bores,

shortens the books,

drains the blood from professors’ careers,

and politicians’

cuts the balls from

man after man

Why Adam and Noah

if not for war?”

Several of the poems are written with a rhythm that would make them especially interesting to be read out loud. Some, if you read carefully, are love poems to lost buddies. Some are straightforward in their story telling; others make creative use of symbolism. A few are fairly light-hearted, but most are as serious as the idea of endless war.

I admire Emerson Gilmore’s poetic efforts to reduce the numbers of American casualties in the war: “If I turn on the radio,/sons will die. The man/will say so. I have not/turned on the television for/months, saving countless lives.”

There’s also serious PTSD at work here, along with occasional glimpses of possible redemption.

I read through this volume three times and different things jumped out at me each time. This book of poetry is alive and I encourage you to engage with it. It’s one of the good ones.

–Bill McCloud

Our Best War Stories edited by Christopher Lyke

The title—Our Best War Stories: Prize-Winning Poetry & Prose from the Col. Darron L. Wright Memorial Awards (Middle West Press, 234 pp. $17.99, paper; $9.99, Kindle) edited by Christopher Lyke—sets up expectations that the book meets time and time again. The awards, honoring an Iraq War veteran killed in a training accident, are administered by Line of Advance, an on-line veterans literary journal. Lyke, a U.S. Army veteran of the Afghanistan War, is the journal’s co-founder and editor.

As for the poems, I especially enjoyed “Starling Wire” by David S. Pointer because of its great word flow and the use of words such as “microscopicesque” and “retro-futuristically.” I also liked Eric Chandler’s “Air Born,” which has us flying home with a “war hangover,” and Jeremy Hussein Warneke’s “Facing 2003,” in which he looks at the aftermath of war with a poem inside a poem. Randy Brown’s “Robert Olen Butler wants nachos” deals with desire.

“Soldier’s Song” by Ben Weakley is my favorite among the poems as it lyrically deals with time and worlds that exist in the tip of a bullet that barely misses your head. In “Havoc 58” Laura Joyce-Hubbard describes a grief-filled widowed pilot’s wife as “Dressed black-drunk.”

Some of the short stories that stood out were David R. Dixon’s “The Stay,” about a man who can smell death, and Michael Lund’s “Left-Hearted,” featuring a man with a rare heart condition. Other worthy stories include  “Bagging It Up” by Scott Hubbartt, and “Walking Point” by former Marine Dewaine Farria, my second favorite story in the book, looks at the warden of a small town prison in Oklahoma. Some of his memories are of men who became only “blood-soaked heaps of jungle fatigues on stretchers.” He uncovers a prisoner’s dangerous shank and realizes that prison and war “encourage ingenuity.’”

“Village With No Name” by Ray McPadden is my favorite short story in the book. It’s set in Iraq and looks at a group of men motivated to get their dangerous mission completed quickly because of an impending sandstorm. They shoot dogs “for no particular reason” and carelessly rip down electric lines as they drive through a village. Then, when one of the men is bitten by a poisonous cobra, and the medic says, “I ain’t no snake doctor,” they find themselves begging for help from an old woman and her jar of paste.

Christopher Lyke

In Travis Klempan’s “Some Kind of Storm” a newly discharged veteran finds himself in “the least hospitable place in America,” a Christian rock festival in southern Oklahoma. He encounters the Painted Man (a tribute to Ray Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man) whose tattoos seem to come to life.

The most exciting story is “Green” by Brian L. Braden. In it, a helicopter pilot refueling in-flight suddenly sees tracers from ground fire arcing in the sky. In William R. Upton’s “A Jeep to Quang Tri” we’re aboard a fixed-wing Caribou in Vietnam about to land on a “small dirt strip with more VC than flies on a dog turd.”

Our Best War Stories contains many great poems, stories, and essays—all of them well-told. That’s as good a combination as you can ask for.

–Bill McCloud

The Best of Medic in the Green Time by Marc Levy

Marc Levy’s The Best of Medic in the Green Time: Writings from the Vietnam War and Its Aftermath (Winter Street Press, 563 pp. $24, paper) is a kaleidoscopic book of stories written by Levy and others. Kaleidoscopically, these colorful stories burst out in all directions. They’re collected from a website that Levy, who served as a medic with the First Cavalry Division in the Vietnam War, started in 2007.

The stories, poems, essays, recollections, and reflections are divided into three sections: War, Poetry, and Postwar. There are more than seventy stories in all, three-fourths written by Levy.

Here is some of what we encounter in the opening section on the Vietnam War. A casualty of friendly fire, the first man Levy has to patch up. How to make morning GI coffee. Inflated body counts. Souvenirs taken from the dead. Medals awarded to appease grieving families. Coincidences that save lives. Men voluntarily returning to the war because they missed the adrenaline rush.

Several stories describe extreme combat at a personal level. A buddy dying in Levy’s arms. The attacking Viet Cong dressed only in loin cloths. Men giving themselves self-inflicted wounds to try to keep from returning to combat.

The poems are a mixed bag; some of the best are written by Levy. In “He Would Tell You,” for example, he writes:

 Let me never tell you

Things you cannot know

Let me never tell you

Things that won’t let go.

“Portrait of a Young Girl at Dawn” ends with:

They haul her in.

Beneath the whirling blades

She is spinning, spinning

She is floating away.

“Dead Letter Day,” begins: “He sent the letter to the guy’s wife/The same day,/Leaving out the following:”

We then learn the truth of the man’s death. Things his widow must never know.

One of the best poems, by Tom Laaser, is “Things I Think About at 11:11 on November the 11^th”. In it, a man is attending yet another program for vets in a high-school auditorium and he’s conflicted. He senses that he does not want to be a veteran,

But the second that god damn flag is unfurled

And that crappy high school band strikes up you

Give way to unyielding patriotism of the highest degree.

I bled for this

You want to scream.

I am a veteran. This is MY country. I earned this freedom.

I earned

This day.

Marc Levy, left, at LZ Compton in An Loc, 1969

The third part, “Postwar,” includes a small section on combat humor, as well as one on how to talk to college students about the war, and one on the symptoms and treatments of PTSD because, as Levy writes, “Whatever you did in war will always be with you.” An especially interesting section includes comments from dozens of veterans describing what they think when some well-meaning person says, “Thank you for your service.”

It’s a phrase Levy considers to be “petty.”

This is a great book because of the well-written variety of stories and topics Levy covers. It’s also great because of how it’s put together. There is no reason to read the more than seventy chapters in order. Dig in and skip around any way you choose.

A kaleidoscope of stories awaits you.

Marc Levy’s website, Medic in the Green Time, is medicinthegreentime.com

–Bill McCloud

Far and Away by Frank Light

Frank Light’s Far and Away (Finishing Line Press, 21 pp. $14.99, paper) is a poetry chapbook containing five poems—or eight, depending on how you count them. Its twenty pages tell of several lifetimes and a few trips around the world, including to South Vietnam during the American war. Light was drafted into the Army and served a 1967-68 Vietnam War tour of duty in Nha Trang.

The title of the first poem appears to be a made-up word–something a writer can more easily get away with in poetry. Said title, “Cotophrasis,” comes from the idea that it’s an ekphrastic poem about a painting by Frederic Edwin Church of the volcano called Cotopaxi in the Andes. The first line of this first poem is a great one: “Church went south of south.”

The second poem, “World of Wonders,” is divided into four parts. Each is also a stand-alone poem. One of them is a prose poem that creates a Swedish scene that comes to life as you read the descriptive stanzas. Another one makes interesting use of the space on the page and includes a French phrase that can be read as both a question and a reply, a great use of word play. This poem also deals with two groups in southern Morocco, non-believers and believers. Or perhaps it’s non-believers becoming believers.

The third part of the second poem drops us into the Long An Province in the Mekong Delta in southern Vietnam. The fourth part—a prose poem that includes a sentence that is 118 words long and contains seven commas—puts us in a Spanish town near the French border.

While reading these dense (that’s a good thing) poems we end up dropping anchor or pitching a tent in Gibraltar, the Congo, the Casbah, Dakar, the Canaries, the Sahara, and other places, primarily in the Middle East. Memories of past conflicts and wars keep bubbling up.

In Frank Light’s poetry there are no add-on or throw-away lines, so there’s great significance in words such as “her sunglasses which you broke rolling over.” This is a personal, challenging, small collection of poetry that rewards the reader who confronts these human adventures. Despite the title, I’m left with the sense that one can go far without actually going away. The final poem, fittingly, tells of a fruitless search for a certain gravestone in a cemetery.

Here are my favorite lines from the collection:

Full roof, half moon. Stars swoon.

Make a wish.

The book’s page on the publisher’s website is: finishinglinepress.com/product/far-and-away-by-frank-light/

–Bill McCloud

Fragments by Bruce K. Berger

Fragments: The Long Coming Home from Vietnam (Wordworthy Press, 92 pp. $12.95, paper; $11, Kindle) is a poetry chapbook by Bruce K. Berger. Berger served with the 101^st Airborne Division in Vietnam in 1970, writing sympathy letters to hundreds of families. This chapbook is as good a collection of poetry dealing with the Vietnam War as I’ve read.

There’s no dipping a toe in the water here. In the first section of the first poem Berger references the My Lai massacre, napalm, Agent Orange, AWOLs and “Dinks and Gooks.”

Berger writes of the “bloody mathematics” involved in taking, abandoning, then re-taking territory. Men around him wonder why they were there. “Why the hell were we, where the hell we were?” At one point he notes that “The long war symbolized so many lies/some of them true.”

Elsewhere he writes about the sympathy letters: “What more could he write/without deepening their pain?” He also writes of holding buddies while their lives slip away and remembering one soldier who died with a smile on his face. You don’t realize at the time that being “Impregnated by orange rain” means you were killed in Vietnam, though you won’t die until thirty years later.

He addresses the times on guard-duty when you have a chance to note the country’s fleeting moments of beauty. Then the rain and other natural sounds seem to combine to create “the jungle band.” Eventually there’s “The precious gift of sunrise in Vietnam.”

He shares in the comfort that can be found in a stray dog. Then there’s the “contagious smile” of the young boy with a “missing foot.” There’s also an old woman who continues to look for her grandson, although he died months earlier after being “shot by Aaron from Akron.” A young girl has “tiny breasts” that recall “two little sparrows/poking just barely/under her tee-shirt.”

Returning home from the war means “picking up where they left off/one year a century ago.” Then memories began to hit like “hot grease spattering his brain.” Memories that you begin to think of as “just dead life.” There is some evidence of healing once you are “no longer drinking suicide” and have started doing “drive bys” of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

Berger in Vietnam

The stories told in these poems are the memories of one American Vietnam War veteran. The collection is not all-encompassing. It doesn’t try to explain the causes of the war or the motives of the people fighting on the other side. It’s personal, and poetry may be the most personal form of written expression.

There are 34 poems in this book. None of them is a throw-away. Each brings something to the table. The inclusion of 24 illustrations creates a complete package.

This is an unflinching look at the horrors of war and one man’s life-long efforts to escape its memories told in the form of poetry. Berger is a true word-artist.

The book’s Facebook page is facebook.com/fragmentspoems

Bruce Berger is donating profits from book sales to Vietnam Veterans of America.

–Bill McCloud