Blog 7 FY

Yusef Komunyakaa is a black veteran from the Vietnam war who wrote the book Dien Cai Dau. Dien Cai Dau is translated as an expression that Vietnamese soldiers used to describe the Americans meaning "crazy". I think by having the title be crazy Yusef is addressing the fact that going into Vietnam was crazy in the first place and the battles that occurred during the way was chaotic and "crazy". The book itself is a collection of poems pertaining to the war and Komunyakaa's experiences in Vietnam. The poems reiterate many of the themes and experiences other war novelists have presented to us.

The first poem I chose to write about is called "Sappers". The poem has a fairly strange form in that it starts off talking about all the drugs that mess with your head that the soldiers took while fighting. It ends by describing the Vietnamese soldiers who keep coming at them and readily sacrifice their lives to help their comrades and promote their cause. Although drugs and death by machine gun are not outwardly similar topics, Komunyakaa describes them in a similar way. He says that drugs send people through a concertina which, to me, brings about images of repetitiveness because of the music instruments constant back and forth motion. I think this sameness is like the fighting he describes because the descriptions in the poems that he uses bring about images of machine guns constantly firing nonstop and a never ending wave of enemies that keep coming to replace their falling comrades. The way he says the soldiers "fling themselves" into the Americans arms makes it sound like they fully expect to die and are just running toward death without caring anymore. I think his description can be applied to the war in general. It was a constant battle with nature and with the enemy to stay alive to the point where it is almost described as boring. This poem brings about the theme of drugs like opium that we have read about in many of our other novels that was readily accessible to the soldiers. It also mentions women on the minds of the soldiers which reminds me of how "Things They Carried" said that every soldier had a girl back home that they often thought about as a reminder of the comfort of home and a past life.

The second poem I chose is called "Thanks". This is a very interesting poem that explores the theme of luck and the supernatural that soldiers often relied upon to save them during the war. This poem talks about how the protagonist was lucky that a tree was in the way because it stopped a snipers bullet and saved his life. It also talks about other things like the grass swaying in the direction of an enemy that alerted the protagonist to their whereabouts. Then in the end the character says that a hand grenade that would have surely killed him was a dud which also resulted in him being alive today. All these experiences show how narrow the line between life and death in the war was. It was luck that played a large part in the survival of the soldiers. It is no wonder that they almost worshiped luck during the war. It was a thing beyond their control, and to have the illusion of control over it many soldiers believed they had a certain amount that could be spent. In "Things They Carried" Tim says that one soldier was killed because his luck ran out, which is how I think many people fighting felt about the properties of luck; it could run out. Also the theme of spirituality makes a small appearance when Komunyakaa says that they were fighting for the entertainment of "blind Gods". This reminded me of the character Kiowa in "Things They Carried" and his theme of spirituality. The war may have seemed so illogical to some soldiers that they had to fall under the belief that they were fighting for the pleasure of Gods who did not care for them. Once again in this poem Yusef brings women into the mix almost randomly. In the middle of his giving thanks the time periods completely switch, briefly, to a moment back home in San Francisco when the protagonist was wrapped in the protective arms of a women. I think he was likening his random luck of being alive to the secure comfort he might have felt when with this woman.

The final poem that I chose to write about is called "Losses". This poem addresses a theme that is present in every Vietnam story we have read; the theme of coming home to find life is no longer the same. After all the things the author did in Vietnam and the people he killed the poem starts by saying he no longer trusts his hands with loved ones. I think he feels that something about him has been tainted and being with his loved ones can never be the same. Maybe he is afraid that after his hand killed people in Vietnam they would not know when to stop and cause injury to his family and friends as well. The poem then says that his girlfriend left him, who might have been the very same person he dreamed about during the war. While fighting he may have fantasized about going back home and spending his days as noncholantly as he did before the fighting began. As we have seen, however, more often than not this is not the case. He writes how he cant stop doing the things he was trained to do like blend in with the hills and look for potential enemies. In the poem it said "a dress or scarf in the distance can nail him to dogwood". This shows that he is so accustomed to being on edge all the time from potential danger he sees everyone as an enemy. This reminded me of the story Marc Levy told about his trip to Vietnam and how after all the years away he fell into combat habits he practiced during the war, like walking in a crouch. I feel like when soldiers depend on these instincts with their lives it is very hard to unlearn them which makes the adjustment when coming home much harder. The poem transitions to describing life back home to describing the city like the scenery in Vietnam, then in the end it reverts back to the sound of cars and civilization. I think this describes the protagonists thought process during this described scene in his life. It shows how he had so much trouble with regular life the scenery changed in his mind to that which would have been present during the war, and then as if he needed to face reality it goes back to regular life.