Vietnam

The Vietnam Wall by Alberto Rios (1988)


I
Have seen it
And I like it: The magic,
The way cutting onions
It brings water out of nowhere.
Invisible from one side, a scar
Into the skin of the ground
From the other, a black winding
Appendix line.
A dig.
An archaeologist can explain.
The walk is slow at first,
Easy, a little black marble wall
Of a dollhouse,
A smoothness, a shine
The boys in the street want to give.
One name. And then more
Names, long lines, lines of names until
They are the shape of the U.N Building
Taller than I am: I have walked
Into a grace.
And everything I expect has been taken away, like that, quick:
The names are not alphabetized.
They are in the order of dying,
An alphabet of-somewhere-screaming.
I start to walk out. I almost leave
But stop to look up names of friends,
My own name. There is somebody
Severiano Rios.
Little kids do not make the same noise
Here, the junior high school boys don’t run
Or hold each other in headlocks.
No rules, something just persists
Like pinching on St. Patrick’s Day
Every year for no green.
No one knows why.
Flowers are forced
Into the cracks
Between sections.
Men have cried
At this wall.
I have
Seen them.


The archaeologist goes back in the past to document history and statistics. He learns how things were before the bloodshed and guerilla warfare, the Post Traumatic Stress Disorder ridden veterans, those who have suffered from Agent Orange, various types of cancers and constant reoccurring dreams, hallucinations, and feelings. He learns how things were before the veterans became addicted to alcohol, cocaine, heroin, and marijuana. Before the homelessness and the drug rehab programs that constantly fail because the Vietnam veterans are permanently traumatized by their experiences, so their addictions continue, month after month, year after year.
At this wall, it is even socially acceptable for grown men to cry, and there are plenty of them too. There are those who go to visit brothers, uncles, fathers, sons, nephews, cousins, grandfathers, and best friends, and then there are those who just go to pay their respects, even though they might not know or be related to anyone whose name is engraved on that vast black marble wall that seems to stretch for an eternity.
Individuals take pieces of paper and crayons or a pencil with them when they go to the wall in order to etch the name of their loved one or friend onto the paper to save so as to remember the person who died.
Vietnam was a vicious place to fight and both sides had hundreds of thousands of people slaughtered, wiped off the face of the Earth forever. The people that were killed in Vietnam weren’t just men either, they were women and children also. Whole villages were being ransacked, destroyed and obliterated, and bodies strewn everywhere in the landscape.