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PREFACE
- University of Iowa Press
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Preface ix “Where is their home?” This was my question as a four-year-old, when my mother and father explained that we were sponsoring a Vietnamese family, refugees from the war, and bringing them home. My father, who served in Vietnam as a U.S. naval advisor on a South Vietnamese patrol gunboat , and my mother, a lifelong pacifist, navigated the maze of tents stretching into the distance at Camp Pendleton. The fourteen members of the N— — family huddled in a dusty tent, one family among hundreds, and we greeted each other without words. For a short time, I would share my room with Lam and Dǔng—boys a few years older than me—while my parents tried to find the family an apartment, battling racist landlords reluctant to rent to foreigners . Thirty years later, when my wife and I visit the N— — s’ beautiful home in suburban San Diego, they throw open the door and welcome us with open arms. When we sit down, Ba, the patriarch, tells the story of how we became one family in 1975, and he does not hold back his tears—tears of gratitude, tears of sorrow—as memories of that war and its aftermath flood back. Despite our geographical distance from battlefields in the past century, war has always come home. Soldiers who don’t make it back alive, and the soldiers who do—war returns in the bodies and minds of veterans who return but are altered by its fire. Veterans who weep behind dark sunglasses as my father pins medals onto their worn fatigues during the 1986 Vietnam veteran parade in Chicago. The vets who dive into the closet when thunder strikes. Uncle D— — who never talked about his Purple Hearts from the Second World War. Great-uncle C— —who spent his entire adult life in an asylum after he returned from the First World War. The loved ones, the communities, the workplaces, churches, and other groups who await and absorb their return— each of us is only one or two degrees of separation from our country’s mostly distant battlefields. Indeed, as the peace movement has shown, war is never just over there; in a democratic republic, our daily lives as citizens, taxpayers, voters, and consumers , connect us inextricably to the decisions and structures that aid and abet warfare. Further, the peace movement’s radical wing has shown the ways in which structural injustices at home—racism, sexism, class inequity—manifest violence that is almost inseparable from the violence that soldiers experience in the confusion that is war. (War is, after all, derived from the Indo-European root word meaning to confuse.) This book shows how civilian poets have played a crucial role both in the peace movement and in war resistance more generally; these poets on the homefront—through their poetry and their involvement in resistance—have made visible the moral confusion of war and its ultimate damage to societies (including to the ones who win). Alongside antiwar veterans, these poets articulate more than a vision of war— they summon a portrait of resistance that both mirrors and exhorts the peace movement itself. While it may be true that some wars are inevitable, and some may even be necessary, this book argues that a vital peace movement, aided and prodded by poets, is also necessary to ensure our common futures. Living in a society where the military-industrial complex exerts a dangerous influence over our politics, in the center of empire, we need voices that counter the insistent drumbeats of war, to remind us that we live in an increasingly interdependent world. I am grateful to those who aided in the writing of this book, especially Tom Foster, as well as Eva Cherniavsky, Jeanne Colleran, Michael Davidson, Chris Green, and Susan Gubar—all of whom contributed extensive advice. Thanks as well to Steven Gould Axelrod, Dick Bennett (COPRED/Omni), Michael Bibby, Purnima Bose, Robert Cording, Alan Golding, Tom Gottschang, Peter Kvidera, Jon LaGuardia (for help with the index), E. J. McAdams, Aldon Nielson, Helen Sword, and Michael True for their encouragement and advice on aspects of the project. Thanks to John Carroll University and Indiana University for providing research funding during various phases of the project. Thanks to the Swarthmore College Peace Collection librarians for their help in locating some lost links between the peace movement and poetry . Thanks to the Houghton Library for permission to visit Robert Lowell’s archive. Thanks to the FBI for not...