Blog 6 JY

Dien Cai Dau means crazy in the head. This title is very revealing about what the poems will be about.
"A Greenness Taller Than Gods" describes being in the jungles of Vietnam. He describes the devastation in the jungles. How all the napalm has burned the jungles and how the animals are all burning or trying to get away. The soldiers wished that they walked like the trees which are the Vietcong that are one with the jungles. When he talks about the branches quivering after they cross with the VC this shows how they are actually becoming more like the trees, because they are afraid but not making it that noticeable. In the last few sentence he talks about how they are able to maneuver through the forest without making noises and how their shadows left them. The shadows represent their old selves that have left and are now lost. They will never become the same selves that they were before. This poem shows how when they went in the jungles how much the war changed them.
"Tu Do Street" is about the soldier life when they went to R&R. Tu Do Street is a street with prostitution and drug trafficking. This poem is about the racism against the black soldier in the war. "Drawing lines in the dust" represents how the races separated from each other. He talks about how he went to a Vietnamese bar where there is white music playing. The author describes how the war was the only thing to bring the soldiers together. The prostitutes also are the ones that unite the blacks and whites because they are having sex with the same person. This is a common interest that they share.
"Toy in a Field" talks about the post war events in Vietnam. It shows how children used the left over weaponry to play around. Kom describes the children as vulture that silently play on the broken helicopters. Everyone then is able to go home except the illegitimate child that had a white father. He is left alone outside with a machine gun that his father may of had held. This describes how the American soldiers had children unknowingly and how tortured the children were when the soldiers left.
These poems show different aspects of the war but they all depict the hardship that people faced during the war. The only time were race was not an issue was when they were in combat where they have to save each others life. During the time they weren't in country the soldier also reeked havoc on the Vietnamese by having intercourse with prostitutes and then illegitimate children were born. They also lost who they originally were when they went inside the jungle. This is basically about the hardship of the war and the effects of the war years later.