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    Vietnumb
    Vietnumb
    Vietnumb
    Ebook86 pages33 minutes

    Vietnumb

    By Fred Rosenblum

    ()

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    About this ebook

    The primary focus of Vietnumb is to convey the need to break the cycle of violence, this culture of war that we seem destined to repeat, ad infinitum, ad nauseam. As a result of my personal involvement five decades ago in Vietnam, I should liken these poems to the testimonies of those in the documentary film, "Winter Soldier." I will never escape the extortion of guilt that was borne out of my participation in that misadventure, but if I might lyrically impact one young man or prevent one young woman from falling prey - to the insidious, the mendacious masters of war, I will have served my country better than I did those many years ago. A gritty narrative in verse, Vietnumb is a recollection of my time as a nineteen year old field marine in "the unpopular war" — a period that continues to plague me in the onerous aftermath of its wake.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherFomite
    Release dateMay 10, 2018
    ISBN9781944388393
    Vietnumb

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      Book preview

      Vietnumb - Fred Rosenblum

      Preface

      It’s been just shy of a half century since I served with the 1st Marines in Vietnam. Peering into that rear view mirror, many of us came home with our purple hearts, war trophies, and fractured psyches - to the collective-cold-shoulder of a divided nation. Our families and friends weren’t calling us heroes back then, in fact, they refuted us with a contemptible reception. The combined effects of their scorn and the catalog of atrocities we’d been a party to, would result in what Dr. Jonathan Shay called, ‘The Undoing of Character’ (Achilles in Vietnam).

      Every bit of evidence pointed to our hostile engagement with the North Vietnamese to be rooted in, and fomented by, the bogus provocations of the US military hierarchy and the Lyndon Johnson Administration (The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, 1964). Considering what those conspiratorial lies cost us; it wouldn’t be hard to predict the emotionally-charged responses of the American public. The Vietnam Veterans Against the War movement and its membership of malcontents who’d put it all on the line over there, threw their medals at the Capitol in DC in April 1971. A month later the Pentagon Papers surfaced, leaked by Daniel Ellsberg to the New York Times. This level of betrayal by our presidents going as far back as Harry Truman, made it equally difficult for any citizen principled in human decency to accept; sans the manifestations of insurrection, peaceful or otherwise.

      My first book of poems, Hollow Tin Jingles, began as an exercise in expurgation. Vietnumb is the result of my inability to retch-up and rid myself of that entire toxic mass that’s kept me belly-aching all these years. In addition to relieving my own pain, I’ve been gifted with the opportunity and, moreover, the responsibility, to administer a lyrical analgesic to others who bear some degree of residual shame for that era. It is my hope, via the retrospective lens of my experiences those many years ago in Southeast Asia, to remind those of us who may have forgotten, that the mistakes we made yesterday are the mistakes we are making today. Sounds a bit clichéd, but the analogies are striking and the mendacity has grown more epic. The war machine thrives today as it has never thrived before.

      Fred

      Not a Limerick, a Prologue

      I had a friend who

      alongside myself

      joined the Marines

      came home from the jungle

      to a wife who’d become so ugly

      He shot himself in the Hemingway head

      and/or so it was said

      that in any case

      a rub was discovered

      uncovered and curing

      in a brine of Shakespearean irony

      Part One

      All gave some; some gave all

      -Howard William Osterkamp

      That Last Night

      A Greyhound hauled me back to Oceanside

      My Uncle Leonard, in all of his miserable wisdom

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