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W. D. EHRHART
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386 W. D. EHRHART b. 1948 W. d. ehrhart grew up in rural Pennsylvania, the son of a Protestant minister and a special education teacher. Upon graduating from high school, he enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps and served for three years, including thirteen months in Vietnam during the Tet Offensive of 1968. Subsequently he received a B.A. from Swarthmore, an M.A. from the University of Illinois, Chicago, and a Ph.D. from the University of Wales. He has earned his living as a writer and a high school teacher. He was a U.S. delegate to the First Conference of U.S. and Vietnamese Veteran-Writers in Hanoi. Ehrhart is married, has a daughter, and lives in Philadelphia. further reading Kevin Bowen, Nguyen Ba Chung, and Bruce Weigl, eds. Mountain River: Vietnamese Poetry from the Wars, 1948–1993. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998. W. D. Ehrhart. Beautiful Wreckage: New & Selected Poems. Easthampton, Mass.: Adastra Press, 1999. — — — —. The Bodies Beneath the Table. Easthampton, Mass.: Adastra Press, 2010. — — — —. Ordinary Lives: Platoon 1005 and the Vietnam War. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999. W. D. Ehrhart, ed. Unaccustomed Mercy: Soldier-Poets of the Vietnam War. Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 1989. H. Bruce Franklin, ed. The Vietnam War in Stories, Poems & Songs. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995. Philip Mahoney, ed. Both Sides Now: The Poetry of the Vietnam War and Its Aftermath. New York: Scribner’s, 1998. Relative Thing We are the ones you sent to fight a war you didn’t know a thing about. It didn’t take us long to realize the only land that we controlled was covered by the bottoms of our boots. When the newsmen said that naval ships had shelled a VC1 staging point, 1. VC stands for Viet Cong, the political and military organization that fought the U.S. and South Vietnamese forces during the war. Relative Thing Ø 387 2. Hue City is located in South Vietnam in Hue Province, near the border with North Vietnam . In the Tet Offensive of 1968, the Battle of Hue occurred in the city. Hue City is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. 3. ARVN refers to the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (that is, South Vietnam). 4. A labor union. 5. Saigon was the capital of South Vietnam; it is now known as Ho Chi Minh City. 6. Metal cigarette lighter. 7. U.S. amphibious assault vehicles. we saw a breastless woman and her stillborn child. We laughed at old men stumbling in the dust in frenzied terror to avoid our three-ton trucks. We fought outnumbered in Hue City2 while the ARVN3 soldiers looted bodies in the safety of the rear. The cookies from the wives of Local 1044 did not soften our awareness. We have seen the pacified supporters of the Saigon5 government sitting in their jampacked cardboard towns, their wasted hands placed limply in their laps, their empty bellies waiting for the rice some district chief has sold for profit to the Viet Cong. We have been Democracy on Zippo6 raids, burning houses to the ground, driving eager amtracs7 through new-sown fields. We are the ones who have to live with the memory that we were the instruments of your pigeon-breasted fantasies. We are inextricable accomplices in this travesty of dreams: but we are not alone. We are the ones you sent to fight a war you did not know a thing about— those of us that lived have tried to tell you what went wrong. Now you think you do not have to listen. [44.204.24.82] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 10:19 GMT) Ø Carol Frost 388 * * * Just because we will not fit into the uniforms of photographs of you at twenty-one does not mean you can disown us. We are your sons, America, and you cannot change that. When you awake, we will still be here. 1975 A comparatively early Vietnam War poem, still raw with emotion, “A Relative Thing” offers a soldier’s view of the war. Ehrhart expresses anger about the wartime horrors he has seen and about the lack of understanding soldiers received from the homefront. Compare this poem to the later Vietnam War poems by Yusef Komunyakaa, Gerald McCarthy, Ray A. Young Bear, and Bao-Long Chu. CAROL FROST b. 1948 Carol frost creates poems of a sometimes painful beauty, poems that often dramatize moments of displacement or metamorphosis, when the observer’s sense of reality...