anti-war poetry – Engaging Peace

Myra MacPherson, adapted from an article published in Consortium News February 16, 2015: https://consortiumnews.com/tag/myra-macpherson/

A U.S. riverboat (Zippo monitor) deploying napalm during the Vietnam War<br>This image is in the public domain. — A U.S. riverboat (Zippo monitor) deploying napalm during the Vietnam War
This image is in the public domain.

According to Don Blackburn, “I thought I could serve my country without sacrificing my morality — a very naïve notion. But I fought harder to keep my morality/humanity than I fought the ‘enemy’. It cost me. I was under near constant harassment — two article 15’s, the threat of imprisonment, many restrictions and odious (literally, burning shit,) details, guard duty, K.P. When I returned from Viet Nam, I was a private E-1, the lowest rank possible. But I never tried to get out of the service, and this, I think, pissed the army off even more.”

After the war, Blackburn became a teacher in Oregon and, while battling PTSD, wrote searing poetry, now in a book called All You Have Given: Meditations on War, Peace & Reconciliation. Like many veterans who came back troubled from a war fought in and around civilians, this aspect was the most disturbing. Two of his disorderly conduct actions were for refusing to go on “search and destroy” missions.

Napalm was dropped from planes and shot from guns for no other use than to incinerate; bright orange walls of intense fire that spared no one and stuck to skin, impossible to shuck off. Victims were embodied in the 1972 Pulitzer Prize iconic picture of a nine-year-old girl running naked in terror, her body still burning, having torn off her clothes to escape the pain.

Like many Vietnamese, Kim Phuc astounds Americans by saying she has forgiven those who caused her excruciating pain: “It was the hardest work of my life, but I did it.” In the end, “I learned that forgiveness is more powerful than any weapon of war.”

Don Blackburn’s desire to save civilians was shatteringly personal. “There was a lot of napalm used where I was.” He recalls in poetry a still haunting incident:

Fire in the Village near Ben Cat, 1967

With all my strength I hold onto you.

I will not, cannot, let you go.

Together we tremble in fear and sorrow.

Our eyes bitten blind by swirling smoke.

Our faces stung by wind-blown, fried sand.

The conical hat, ripped off your head,

bursts into flame a few feet in front of us.

In tortured anguish, you scream at the sky:

Why? Why?

With all my strength I hold you.

Your heart pounds fierce through your chest.

You kick, try to bite, strain against my arms,

You try to pry and squirm loose.

You yell at me to let you go.

But I cannot, will not.

You will run back into your fire-engulfed house.

Try to save, or be with, whatever/whoever

Is still inside.,,,

Together, we tremble in fear and sorrow,

And cry, cry, cry until there is no sound.

At first light tomorrow, you will return,

to see what can be found.

Myra MacPherson is the author of the Vietnam classic, Long Time Passing: Vietnam and the Haunted Generation. She has continued to lecture and write about Vietnam and veterans.

Moral engagement depends on moral agency—both inhibitive moral agency (refusing to let others push one into immoral behavior) and proactive moral agency (actively pursuing moral goals even in the face of threat and danger). For generations, women have expressed both forms of agency in anti-war poetry.

Julia Ward Howe, in her poem “Mother’s Day Proclamation,” recommends inhibitive agency when she first tells women,

“Say firmly:
“We will not have questions answered by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage,
For caresses and applause.”

Howe invokes proactive agency in the conclusion of her poem when she urges women to gather together:

“To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,
The amicable settlement of international questions,
The great and general interests of peace.”

Poems have a remarkable power to promote compassion and empathy. See these expressed in the work of a marvelous anti-war poet of the Vietnam era—Denise Levertov—in this YouTube production.

Can inhibitive moral agency promote peace? Listen to the magnificent Palestinian American woman, Suheir Hammed, tell you what she won’t do (“kill for you”) in her poem, “What I will” (shown above).

Does this poem leave you feeling energized and motivated to resist the war machine?

Can women poets take on generals, Presidents, Pentagons to reject the propaganda and the evils of war? Read “The low road” by Marge Piercy.

We think you will answer “Yes” to both questions.

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology

Rebelling Against the War: Endless Tragedy of Vietnam, Part 5

Women anti-warriors: Fighting war with poetry