Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

SAILING TO BIEN HOA

"Out of the horror there rises a musical ache that is beautiful ..." — James Wright

SAILING TO BIEN HOA

In my dream of the hydroplane I'm sailing to Bien Hoa the shrapnel in my thighs like tiny glaciers.

I remember a flower,
a kite, a mannequin playing the guitar,
a yellow fish eating a bird, a truck floating in urine, a rat carrying a banjo,
a fool counting the cards, a monkey praying,
a procession of whales, and far off two children eating rice,
speaking French —

I'm sure of the children,
their damp flutes,
the long line of their vowels.


GIRL AT THE CHU LAI LAUNDRY

All this time I had forgotten.
My miserable platoon was moving out one day in the war and I had my clothes in the laundry.
I ran the two dirt miles,
convoy already forming behind me. I hit the block of small hooches and saw her twist out the black rope of her hair in the sun.
She did not look up at me,
not even when I called to her for my clothes.
She said I couldn't have them,
they were wet ...

Who would've thought the world stops turning in the war, the tropical heat like hate and your platoon moves out without you,
your wet clothes piled at the feet of the girl at the laundry,
beautiful with her facts.


THE WAY OF TET

Year of the monkey, year of the human wave,
the people smuggled weapons in caskets through the city in long processions undisturbed and buried them in Saigon graveyards.
At the feet of their small Buddhas weary bar girls burned incense before the boy soldiers arrived to buy them tea and touch them where they pleased. Twenty years and the feel of a girl's body so young there's no hair is like a dream, but living is a darker thing,
the iron burning bee who drains the honey,
and he remembers her twisting in what evening light broke into the small room in the shack in the labyrinth of shacks in the alley where the lost and corrupted kept house.
He undressed her for the last time,
each piece of clothing a sacrifice she surrendered to the war the way the world had become.
Tomorrow blood would run in every province.
Tomorrow people would rise from tunnels everywhere and resurrect something ancient from inside them,
and the boy who came ten thousand miles to touch her small self lies beside the girl whose words he can't understand,
their song a veil between them.

She is a white bird in the bamboo, fluttering.
She is so small he imagines he could hold all of her in his hands and lift her to the black sky beyond the illumination round's white light where she would fly from her life and the wounds from the lovers would heal,
the broken skin grow back.
But he need only touch her, only lift the blanket from her shoulders and the automatic shape of love unfolds,
the flare's light burning down on them,
lost in a wave that arrives after a thousand years of grief at their hearts.


TEMPLE NEAR QUANG TRI, NOT ON THE MAP

Dusk, the ivy thick with sparrows squawking for more room is all we hear; we see birds move on the walls of the temple shaping their calligraphy of wings.
Ivy is thick in the grottoes,
on the moon-watching platform and ivy keeps the door from fully closing.

The point man leads us and we are inside, lifting the white washbowl, the smaller bowl for rice, the stone lanterns and carved stone heads that open above the carved faces for incense.
But even the bamboo sleeping mat rolled in the corner,
even the place of prayer, is clean.
And a small man

sits legs askew in the shadow the farthest wall casts halfway across the room.
He is bent over, his head rests on the floor and he is speaking something as though to us and not to us.
The CO wants to ignore him;
he locks and loads and fires a clip into the walls which are not packed with rice this time and tells us to move out.

But one of us moves towards the man,
curious about what he is saying.
We bend him to sit straight and when he's nearly peaked at the top of his slow uncurling his face becomes visible, his eyes roll down to the charge wired between his teeth and the floor.
The sparrows burst off the walls into the jungle.


HIM, ON THE BICYCLE

"There was no light; there was no light at all ..."
— Roethke

In a liftship near Hue,
the door gunner is in a trance.
He's that driver who falls asleep at the wheel between Pittsburgh and Cleveland staring at the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

Flares fall,
where the river leaps I go stiff,
I have to think, tropical.

The door gunner sees movement,
the pilot makes small circles:
four men running, carrying rifles,
one man on a bicycle.

He pulls me out of the ship,
there's firing far away.
I'm on the back of the bike holding his hips.
It's hard pumping for two,
I hop off and push the bike.

I'm brushing past trees,
the man on the bike stops pumping,
lifts his feet,
we don't waste a stroke.
His hat flies off,
I catch it behind my back,
put it on, I want to live forever!

Like a blaze streaming down the trail.


SOME THOUGHTS ON THE AMBASSADOR: BONG SON, 1967

Bunker the ambassador.

Does Mr. Bunker have a bunker?

He must have a bunker with chrome faucets and a sauna and a mama san to ease his mind.

They must call it Mr. Bunker's bunker.

He must be shaking his head.

HAND TO HAND

We sit in a circle around First Sergeant. Who wants to try me he says and my hand goes up and before I know what I'm doing I'm doing it. He slams me into the ground like someone made of water — my back, my lungs, some clouds. I take his hand and he spins me and I'm down again. I can feel the day lost, the night I'm in my rack, hurt, unable to sleep, he comes like so much man, leads me past the fireguard, past fifty sleeping soldiers, pushes his bunk aside, pulls me and we dance and I learn hand to hand brothers, learn the places on the body that betray. ... Close my eyes. Open them. Fall violently upward.

SURROUNDING BLUES ON THE WAY DOWN

I was barely in country.
We slipped under the rain-black clouds opening around us like orchids.
He'd come to take me into the jungle so I felt the loneliness though I did not yet hate the beautiful war.
Eighteen years old and a man was telling me how to stay alive in the tropics he said would rot me —

brothers of the heart he said and smiled until we came upon a mama san bent over from her stuffed sack of flowers.
We flew past her but he hit the brakes hard,
he spun the tires backwards in the mud.
He did not hate the war either but other reasons made him cry out to her so she stopped,
she smiled her beetle-black teeth at us,
in the air she raised her arms.

I have no excuse for myself.
I sat in that man's jeep in the rain and watched him slam her to her knees,
the plastic butt of his M16
crashing down on her.
I was barely in country, the clouds hung like huge flowers, black like her teeth.


SONG FOR THE LOST PRIVATE

The night we were to meet in the hotel in the forbidden Cholon district you didn't show so I drank myself into a filthy room with a bar girl who had terrible scars she ran her fingers over as we bartered for the night.
Drunk, I couldn't do anything, angry I threw the mattress to the street and stood naked on the balcony cursing your name to the night.
She thought I was crazy and tried to give my money back.
I don't know how to say I tried again.
I saw myself in the mirror and couldn't move.
In her fist she crushed the paper money,
she curled in sleep away from me so I felt cruel, cold, and small arms fire cracked in the marketplace below.
I thought I heard you call back my name then but white flares lit the sky casting empty streets in clean light and the firing stopped.
I couldn't sleep so I touched her small shoulders, traced the curve on her spine,
traced the scars, the miles we were all from home.

SHORT

There's a bar girl on Trung Hung Do who has half a ten-piaster note I tore in my drunken relief to be leaving the country. She has half and I have half, if I can find it. If I lost it, it wasn't on purpose, it's all I have to remember her. She has a wet sheet, a PX fan, PX radio, and half a ten-piaster note, as if she cared to remember me. She thought it was stupid to tear money and when I handed it to her she turned to another soldier, new in country, who needed a girl. I hope I burn in hell.

THE LAST LIE

Some guy in the miserable convoy raised up in the back of our open truck and threw a can of C rations at a child who called into the rumble for food.
He didn't toss the can, he wound up and hung it on the child's forehead and she was stunned backwards into the dust of our trucks.

Across the sudden angle of the road's curving I could still see her when she rose,
waving one hand across her swollen, bleeding head,
wildly swinging her other hand at the children who mobbed her,
who tried to take her food.

I grit my teeth to myself to remember that girl smiling as she fought off her brothers and sisters.
She laughed as if she thought it were a joke and the guy with me laughed and fingered the edge of another can like it was the seam of a baseball until his rage ripped again into the faces of children who called to us for food.


MONKEY

1

I am you are he she it is we are you are they are.
I am you are he she it is we are you are they are.
When they ask for your number pretend to be breathing.
Forget the stinking jungle,
force your fingers between the lines.
Learn to get out of the dew.
The snakes are thirsty.
Bladders, water, boil it, drink it.
Get out of your clothes.
You can't move in your green clothes.
Your O.D. in color issues clothes.
Get out the plates and those who ate,
those who spent the night.
Those small Vietnamese soldiers.
They love to hold your hand.
Back away from their dark cheeks.
Small Vietnamese soldiers.
They love to love you.
I have no idea how it happened.
I remember nothing but light.

2

I don't remember the hard swallow of the lover.
I don't remember the burial of ears.
I don't remember the time of the explosion.
This is the place where curses are manufactured,
delivered like white tablets.
The survivor is spilling his bedpan.
He slips a curse into your pocket,
you're finally satisfied.
I don't remember the heat in the hands,
the heat around the neck.
Good times bad times sleep get up work. Sleep get up good times bad times.
Work eat sleep good bad work times.
I like a certain cartoon of wounds.
The water which refused to dry.
I like a little unaccustomed mercy.
Pulling the trigger is all we have.
I hear a child.


3

I dropped to the bottom of a well.
I have a knife.
I cut someone with it.
Oh, I have the petrified eyebrows of my Vietnam monkey.
My monkey from Vietnam.
My monkey.
Put your hand here.
It makes no sense.
I beat the monkey.
I didn't know him.
He was bloody.
He lowered his intestines to my shoes. My shoes spit-shined the moment I learned to tie the bow.
I'm not on speaking terms with anyone. In the wrong climate a person can spoil,
the way a pair of boots slows you. ...

I don't know when I'm sleeping.
I don't know if what I'm saying is anything at all.
I'll lie on my monkey bones.


4

I'm tired of the rice falling in slow motion like eggs from the smallest animal.
I'm twenty-five years old,
quiet, tired of the same mistakes,
the same greed, the same past.
The same past with its bleat and pound of the dead,
with its hand grenade tossed into a hooch on a dull Sunday because when a man dies like that his eyes sparkle,
his nose fills with witless nuance because a farmer in Bong Son has dead cows lolling in a field of claymores because the VC tie hooks to their comrades because a spot of blood is a number because a woman is lifting her dress across the big pond.

If we're soldiers we should smoke them if we have them. Someone's bound to point us in the right direction sooner or later.

I'm tired and I'm glad you asked.


5

There is a hill.
Men run top hill.
Men take hill.
Give hill to man.

Me and my monkey and me and my monkey my Vietnamese monkey my little brown monkey came with me to Guam and Hawaii in Ohio he saw all my people he jumped on my daddy he slipped into mother he baptized my sister he's my little brown monkey he came here from heaven to give me his spirit imagine my monkey my beautiful monkey he saved me lifted me above the punji sticks above the mines above the ground burning above the dead above the living above the wounded dying the wounded dying.

SONG OF NAPALM

"The abnormal is not courage ..."

Jack Gilbert

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.


BURNING SHIT AT AN KH

Into that pit
  I had to climb down with a rake and matches; eventually,
  you had to do something because it just kept piling up
  and it wasn't our country, it wasn't our air thick with the sick smoke
  so another soldier and I lifted the shelter off its blocks
  to expose the homemade toilets:
fifty-five-gallon drums cut in half
  with crude wood seats that splintered.
We soaked the piles in fuel oil
  and lit the stuff and tried to keep the fire burning.
  To take my first turn I paid some kid
  a CARE package of booze from home.
I'd walked past the burning once
  and gagged the whole heart of myself —
it smelled like the world
  was on fire,
but when my turn came again
  there was no one so I stuffed cotton up my nose
  and marched up that hill. We poured and poured until it burned and black
  smoke curdled but the fire went out.
  Heavy artillery hammered the evening away in the distance,
  Vietnamese laundry women watched from a safe place, laughing.
  I'd grunted out eight months of jungle and thought I had a grip on things
  but we flipped the coin and I lost and climbed down into my fellow soldiers'
  shit and began to sink and didn't stop until I was deep to my knees. Liftships
  cut the air above me, the hacking blast of their blades
  ripped dust in swirls so every time I tried to light a match
  it died and it all came down on me, the stink
  and the heat and the worthlessness until I slipped and climbed
  out of that hole and ran past the olive-drab
  tents and trucks and clothes and everything green as far from the shit
  as the fading light allowed.
Only now I can't fly.
  I lay down in it and fingerpaint the words of who I am
  across my chest until I'm covered and there's only one smell,
  one word.

CONVOY

On a convoy from Bong Son to Hue we stop at a Vietnamese graveyard. People set up shelter halves right over the top of gravestones: one rock wall just in case. It's raining. I smell people.

Two in the morning someone wakes me for guard. I'm out of bed, standing in the cold. The man next to me walks over to talk. A helicopter is parked thirty yards in front of us and in the moon it begins to move. My friend becomes leader, he wants to fire, I'm afraid of an explosion. He tells me to circle the ship while he covers.

At the window it's dark, no moon. Inside, the pilot, restlessly turning in his sleep, rocking his ship.

LZ NOWHERE

Nights I spent on the dusty runway under the green liftship

tethered down from the wind of the highlands shaping the moonlit fields

surrounding us like care.
I stroked the length of the blades

those nights and moved the rudder and flaps

so it felt like legs parting or someone's arms opening to me.


DOGS

I bought a bar girl in Saigon cigarettes, watches, and Tide soap to sell on the black market and she gave me a room to sleep in and all the cocaine I could live through those nights when I had to leave.
I would sometimes meet them on the stairs,
and she would be wrapped in the soldier who was always drunk, smiling,
her smell all over him.

She ran once to the room screaming about dogs and pulled me down to the street where a crowd of Vietnamese gathered watching two stuck.
The owners fought about whose fault it was.
The owner of the male took off his sandal,
began to beat the female;
the owner of the female kicked the male but they did not part.
The beating made her tighten and her tightening made him swell and she dragged him down the street the crowd running after them.

I remembered my grandfather,
how his pit bull locked up the same way with the neighbor's dog.
The neighbor screamed and kicked and the cop with the nightstick sucked his teeth and circled the dogs as the dogs circled.
Yet my grandfather knew what to do —
not cold water, warm,
warm and pour it slow.

---

Excerpted from "Song of Napalm"
by .
Copyright © 1988 Bruce Weigl.
Excerpted by permission of Grove Atlantic, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---