What Was What
Or
Poets’ Truth
Chris O’Brien

            You have absolutely no idea what the hell was going on, not a clue.

            The poetry from Vietnam is very clear on this point. The average Joe Six-pack civilian who was an armchair general in Vietnam really had no grasp of the situation as a whole, or even in part. An example of this can be found in Michael O’Brien. He has since been dissuaded of his misperceptions, but he used to think that the war was great. He had grown up hearing war stories from World War II and watching John Wayne movies. War to him (back in 1963) was a glorious thing where you charged up hills and/or shot Nazis. (Thinking he was a diabetic, the Army refused him enlistment.) (O’Brien). For the most part, that’s what people thought about war. It was all noble and honorable. At least it was supposed to be. The American people, the soldiers, and even the government had no idea of the situation in Vietnam; this war just was not what they were used to. This sentiment is very clear in many of the poems in W.D. Ehrhart’s anthology Carrying the Darkness, including “Interview with a Guy Named Fawkes” and “Guerrilla War.”

            The sentiment that the public did not understand is illustrated in several poems. Walter McDonald, in his “Interview with a Guy Named Fawkes,” expresses it this way: “what do they know back where / not even their granddam’s days / did any damn red rockets glare” (10-12). The American public heard reports of U.S. soldiers killing women, babies, and old men. G.I. Joe never killed babies! Grandpa in World War I never killed babies. That was what the bad guys did. The people back home really had no idea, however, of the situation in Vietnam. Most of the soldiers did not even know what was happening and they were there! The American people never stopped to ask why the soldiers were killing women and children; rather, they just called them baby killers and harassed them for it. The “guy named Fawkes” later goes on to say that the women and children fired on them (the soldiers) (7). The violence didn’t just go one way. In Vietnam, a soldier was near as likely to get killed by a kid as he was by an adult soldier. The reason that the U. S. soldiers had to burn shacks and kill “Innocent” civilians was because they had to protect themselves. They had no control over anything [the only land they controlled was “covered by the bottoms of our boots” (Ehrhart 95, 5)], so the best strategy, as they saw it, was to get them before they got you. Not only did the soldiers who were present in the war and the people back home not have a full grasp of the situation, but even the president of the United States did not know what was happening. In his “A Concise History of the Vietnam War: 1965-1968),” Ron Weber illustrates how President Johnson thought he had Ho Chi Minh “by the nuts,” but it turns out that he had accidentally grabbed himself (5-10).

            A main reason why the American people did not understand the war, aside from government’s unintentional and intentional deceptions, was the preconceived notions that they had about war. Vietnam was not what people were used to. Support for this statement can be found in the poem “Guerrilla War,” by W. D. Ehrhart. Here, he attempts to explain the enemy to the American people. The Vietcong were not the uniformed, march-in-step-in-line enemies of World War I and World War II. They blended in to the common people so well; they blended into the jungle so well. They dressed the same and spoke the same language as the civilians (4-6). Many of them were the “civilians.” In addition, they didn’t use anywhere near the same tactics as the Axis powers of WWII. The Vietnamese people, men, women, children, were all involved in the effort to expel the U.S forces (13-15). They weren’t content to fight “fairly” (9-12), for they knew they would be defeated if they did. They knew that they would have to fight unconventionally in order to defeat the combined forces of the United States and South Vietnam, since they did not have the military and technological advantages that the United States had. Finally, Ehrhart says that it was