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Ø Gerald McCarthy 384 the earth. Mackey explains in the introduction to Splay Anthem, from which this poem derives, “I couldn’t help thinking of the Andoumboulou as not simply a failed or flawed, earlier form of human being but a rough draft of human being, the work-in-progress we continue to be.” GERALD MCCARTHY b. 1947 Gerald mccarthy is best known for his spare, devastating poems about the Vietnam War and its aftermath. McCarthy was born in upstate New York, the eldest son of an Italian-American mother and a working-class Irish-American father. He joined the U.S. Marines at the age of seventeen and served in Vietnam from 1965 to 1968. After questioning the war at length, he decided to desert . Following his release from military prison and civilian jail, he worked as a stonecutter, a factory hand, and an antiwar activist. He then studied at SUNY Geneseo and the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop and began to write full time. Having taught at prisons and migrant labor camps, he is presently a professor of English at St. Thomas Aquinas College in Sparkill, New York. He lives with his wife and sons in Nyack, New York. He is now writing a memoir about his wartime experiences. further reading W. D. Ehrhart, ed. Unaccustomed Mercy: Soldier-Poets of the Vietnam War. Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 1989. Philip Mahoney, ed. Both Sides Now: The Poetry of the Vietnam War and Its Aftermath. New York: Scribner’s, 1998. Gerald McCarthy. Trouble Light. Albuquerque, N.M.: West End Press, 2008. — — — —. War Story. Langhorne, Penn.: Crossing Press, 1977. The Hooded Legion Ø 385 1. Russian-American Nobel Prize winner in literature . In 1972 Brodsky (1940–1996) became an involuntary exile from Soviet Russia and emigrated to the United States. He had been convicted in the Soviet Union of treason for his dissident writings. 2. Reference to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., as is the later “wall” in this stanza. The Hooded Legion Let us put up a monument to the lie. —Joseph Brodsky1 There are no words here to witness why we fought, who sent us or what we hoped to gain. There is only the rain as it streaks the black stone,2 these memories of rain that come back to us— a hooded legion reflected in a wall. Tonight we wander weaponless and cold along this shore of the Potomac like other soldiers who camped here looking out over smoldering fires into the night. What did we dream of the summer before we went away? What leaf did not go silver in the last light? What hand did not turn us aside? 1992 In “The Hooded Legion,” McCarthy suggests that no words can adequately describe the war and its motives as he examines the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. The “other soldiers” may refer to troops camped along the Potomac River during the U.S. Civil War. You may wish to consider this poem in the context of other Vietnam War poems and antiwar protest poems, such as those by Denise Levertov, Allen Ginsberg, Adrienne Rich, Yusef Komunyakaa, W. D. Ehrhart, Ray A. Young Bear, and Bao-Long Chu. Young Bear’s and Chu’s poems, for example, also allude to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. While Ehrhart’s “A Relative Thing” offers a soldier’s view, which many consider the most telling perspective on war, McCarthy’s “The Hooded Legion” complicates a combatant’s story, adding the dimensions of ethical and psychological questioning as well as the decision to desert the military. ...

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