Di di Mao – Young Guy Named Hal with M-16
By Paul K. Haeder, 2003, Poets Against the War
Di di mao
Get out of here,
boy, emaciated like a
walking zither, legs
shanked by B-52 metal
chopsticks for arms
Di di mao now, boy,
so I get some madam boom-boom
Di di mao
Go on, get out of here,
leave me in my bivouac
tethered to M-16
and howling Credence Clearwater
Budweiser and Castle Rock
cheeseburgers
Di di mao
Black-toothed auntie
your sack of bones
weighted by bamboo shoots
eyes rimmed by leeches
you hiss when I drive by
you twist up like roots — red
exclamation point for tongue
Di di mao
frozen refrain
each zip from my bloated cheeks
zip-zip-zip from Mattel’s
automatic carbine
white horizon courtesy of Dupont
dioxin defoliant
orange noon thanks to DOW
napalm, white phosphorus, caldrons
percolating into my bone
Di di mao
get out of here now,
Charlie, bequest your sisters
and wives, we are
masters of the flesh
sweaty carcasses
lurching for our all-American
pursuit of happiness
Di di moi
swollen delta
where water buffalo
undulate in their gases,
heat from
F-4 Phantoms —
with jaws of a great
white
shark — rattle
elephant tusks.
*–* *–*
Di di Mao (2) – Boy with Dog in Rice Basket
my rainforest is purity
hornbills sail through mists
where my elders follow our joss
stick incense trails
vines like tendrils
to heaven,
the slog and muck and verdant
forest sings songs
of genuflections
to dead brothers and mothers
Di di mao, get out of here now
pulpy-flesh mastodons
go back to your refrigerators
T-bones and French fries
find your leaders
placate your lipless gray kings
who are mean with their green wads
go, find them and ask
why you are running
into our shadows
Di di mao
recede into your choppers
smoky trails lead back to your
land of garish light
your churning chugging citizens
purge from your jet planes
like sunburned bovine —
leave me to my lotus
blossom,
my empty stomach
my sister who is like
an apostrophe
agile, sudden
fragile, but with a bomb
Di di mao
get out of my
Hue, where my monks
self-immolate on the banks of the Perfume
River, butterflies
flutter into memory — watch
my grandmothers throw your
C-rations into the river
your photographs of lipless
sallow men
fleshy children
balloon pin-up girls
float in a river
of fire
Di di mao
we are pleasant in our
stone age — our
mosquitoes like black lace
wet-skinned tigers
lurch after barking deer
vine snakes like liquid titanium
civets watch kingfishers
who spear frogs
like my Viet Cong
sending pongee stakes
wet into your
hearts . . . .
di di mao.
Statistics for the Fall of Saigon 1975:
The official number 58,148 Americans killed during service. An additional 114 were captured and died in captivity.
In the 5 years following the war, the suicide rate of veterans was 1.7 times the non-Veteran population — 9,000 suicides as a direct result of the war.
There were 223,748 South Vietnamese soldiers killed, as well as 5,282 of other nationalities.
According to the Agence France Presse (French Press Agency), “. . .the true civilian casualties of the Vietnam War were 2,000,000 in the north, and 2,000,000 in the south.
Military casualties were 1.1 million killed and 600,000 wounded in 21 years of war. These figures were deliberately falsified during the war by the North Vietnamese
Communists to avoid demoralizing the population.”
So approximately 5.3 million total Vietnamese casualties from 1954 to the Fall of Saigon, April 30th 1975.
Henry Kissinger helped to orchestrate indiscriminate B-52 bombing raids that killed hundreds of thousands of people. As national security adviser (NSA) to President Nixon from 1969-73, and later as US secretary of state from 1973-77, Kissinger was the chief planner of US war policy in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.
A US Senate sub-committee on refugees claims from March 1968 to March 1972 more than three million civilians were killed, wounded or made homeless because of Kissinger’s ruthless political and military maneuvers.
“During this same period, most of which coincides with Kissinger’s role as NSA to the President, the US dropped nearly 4.5 million tons of high explosive on Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia – more than double the tonnage dropped during the whole of the second world war,” writes Peter Tatchell of the Guardian Unlimited.
No smart bomb technology, just shock and awe and more shock as US bombing of civilian and military targets – there wasn’t much the Air Force command did to verify what their bombers were hitting — killed 350,000 civilians in Laos and 600,000 in Cambodia. Multiple that total by three or more for the number of civilians who were wounded and made refugees.
“During the first 30 months of the Nixon-Kissinger administration, the US counter-insurgency Phoenix Program was responsible for the murder or abduction of 35,708 Vietnamese civilians,” Tatchell adds.
Million of gallons of toxic spray in a campaign of ecocide by the US saturated Vietnam in chemical defoliants and pesticides, including Agent Orange. Birth defects and large swaths of land in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia have been rendered useless for farming or human life.
In 2005 PCB levels (found in agent orange) in lactating women’s milk are four to 16 times higher than our own EPA deems as moderately unsafe.