Shadows Of Combat Poetry About The Vietnam Era

Vietnam War Combat Poetry By: SP-5 Nelden John Herron

The American war in Vietnam was one of the most morally contentious events of the twentieth century, and it produced an extraordinary outpouring of poetry. Yet the complex ethical terrain of the conflict is remarkably underexplored, and the prodigious poetic voice of its American participants remains largely unheard. In A Shadow on Our Hearts, Adam Gilbert rectifies these oversights by utilizing the vast body of soldier-poetry to examine the war's core moral issues. The soldier-poets provide important insights into the ethical dimensions of their physical and psychological surroundings before, during, and after the war. They also offer profound perspectives on the relationships between American soldiers and the Vietnamese people. From firsthand experiences, they reflect on what it meant to be witnesses, victims, and perpetrators of the war's violence. And they advance an uncompromising vision of moral responsibility that indicts a range of culprits for the harms caused by the conflict. Gilbert explores the powerful and perceptive work of these soldier-poets through the lens of morality and presents a radically alternative, deeply personal, and ethically penetrating account of the American war in Vietnam.

The imaginative literature of the Vietnam War participates-both overtly and covertly-in a struggle for national memory. First-generation Vietnam War literature, focusing on representations of combat and life in the battlefield, strove to give testimony, to write history. Later writings, in their range of genre and style, investigate and interrogate the very meaning of war. To reflect these two stages, Philip Jason divides his newest book of literary criticism into two sections: 'acts' and 'shadows.' In 'Acts, ' Jason provides formal and cultural readings of combat narratives-by such authors as James Webb, Larry Heinemann, and Joe Haldeman-and explores the meaning of 'authenticity' as applied to Vietnam War texts. 'Shadows' looks both forward and backward from the combat zone, challenging the parameters of what we define as 'Vietnam War literature.

Fifty-five years in the writing, these are the collected poems of W.D. Ehrhart, one of the major figures in Vietnam War literature. Arranged chronologically, it allows readers to trace the development of a writer whose talents are bound together by the lingering physical, psychological, political and intellectual sensibilities the author first developed as a young enlisted Marine during the Vietnam War. And while many of the poems deal with the author's encounter with the Vietnam War and its endless consequences, the poems range widely in content from family and friends to nature and the environment to the blessings and absurdities of the human condition.

Every poet in this anthology represents the terrible beauty that Vietnam engendered in sensitive hearts, the curious grace with which the human spirit can endow even the ugliest realities."No one will get out of this volume without being hammered in the heart and singed in the soul. I could touch the tears on page after page."--Wallace Terry