NaPoWriMo 2024, Day 20, Who Won?

It’s Day Twenty at NaPo where the prompt challenged me to write a poem that recounts a historical event.

Who Won?

Some people think we,
the USA,
won every battle during
the war in Viet Nam.

When attrition
and body count mean more
than maneuver and tactic,

When pawns are used as bait,
it’s chess, not real life.
Has the Army ever
told the truth
at the first chance given?

Classmate Tom, only 20 when drafted
and forced to war
died in the battle Xa Cam My,
near Saigon, Viet Nam,
on the 11th day of April 1966.

In-country only three weeks,
along with nearly 40 of his mates,
many others butchered and maimed
for life—they now can barely tell the story.

Was it the short artillery fire,
the cleverness of the Vietcong,
the foolishness of the USA officers?

Attack after attack by the VC brought more
American blood to earth and more death, until—
not so mercifully, Charley decided
to move on and to fight another day.

Nine years later Saigon fell
and Viet Nam became
one country and America’s
government found other things
to lie about.

Like in 1966 when Private Tom
and 35 virtual strangers died
in a forbidden foreign place
fighting for his Purple Heart
and Combat Infantry Badge.

Twenty years—where did they go?
Twenty years, and for what?
The tag on my shirt says
“Made in the Socialist
Republic of Viet Nam.”

Look both ways and wonder, will it ever be over?
Ignore the gaps at your own peril
so you can go back home in a metal box and declare victory,
or at least the promised “honorable peace.”

Note: While the reference in the poem to 20 years is the full duration of the US involvement in the Viet Nam conflict, it is also the age of my classmate when he was killed. The Battle of Xa Cam My was 58 years ago.

16 thoughts on “NaPoWriMo 2024, Day 20, Who Won?”

    1. When the French were beaten and pulled out in the mid 1950s, the USA moved in. However, as the “Pentagon Papers” show, our involvement began in the late 1940s,

      So while escalation got serious in the early to mid/late 1960s, 1955 to 1975 is the 20-year time period of America’s “Viet Nam War.”
      For me, Daniel Ellsberg’s 2003 book, “Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers” was quite an eye opener.

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    1. Thank you, Dale. One must do the first to get to the second, “living.” I did not do that and (while was in the Air Force) I was never in-country in Viet Nam. All of “them.” Now I read their memoirs and history books (not so much the novels). 🙂

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      1. Yes, I hear you. I am glad you didn’t end up in-country there. A friend of mine was a helicopter pilot. Watching Black Hawk Down was hard for him because he was there, then.
        Yeah, the novels must surely take a less “real” approch.

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      2. Not so long ago I read Blackhawk Down and watched the movie. That was in Somalia in the 1990s. While not even a “war” in the real sense, it shed more light on the folly of power, technology, over and under estimations, and confidence.
        Of course, I read 2x (and re-read parts of) “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien which is ‘something of’ a Viet Nam War novel.

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