COLUMNISTS : Performing a war
Posted on Tuesday, November 18, 2008
SPRINGFIELD, Missouri About 25 of us spent an evening last week with Larry Rottmann in Vietnam. We didn’t actually go there. But he took us anyway, courtesy of a play he’s written and presented other times in other places in the country. Tonight we were in his hometown, in the small theater in back of Big Momma’s coffee house on Commercial Street. Part of the audience was made up of other cast members, who were scattered among the rest of us. They’d join in at their assigned moments in the script, adding voices to the show from their perspectives. Much of the dialogue came from Larry Rottmann’s book of poetry about Vietnam, Voices From the Ho Chi Minh Trail. His poems drew not only from his own experiences during the war, but also from his 19 return trips (so far ) to the country in the post-war years. So his view of Vietnam is broad. It transcends the war itself, but it grew out of the war.
On his trips, he’s made friends with former enemies. They’ve talked about what they did in the war, and how it affected them. These days the similarities between the views of old antagonists are more striking than their differences. Enough time has passed that at least some of those who were there—though not all—have been able to put their wartime experiences to rest. Larry Rottmann and his new Vietnamese friends can laugh and weep together. Their shared past binds them.
Only a couple of the cast members were veterans of Vietnam. The others were teachers, students, friends. Judging by the ages, few of the other members of the audience were veterans of the war, either. There might have been one or two others besides myself. But the experience of reading / hearing the poems was as intense for the cast and audience as it might have been for those who knew the material first-hand. Larry Rottmann has done a remarkable job of distilling the war into his lean lines of poetry and an hour or so of time.
In his other life, he’s a college English teacher. Over the years, he’s also taught courses on Vietnam. He says those classes are always full. It’s been 40 years since the height of the war. But the thirst to understand it—or at least to struggle to understand it—remains strong, even among generations that weren’t born until long after the war passed into history.
Or didn’t. One simple poem tells of a visit by an older American to a Vietnamese center for children fathered by American soldiers. “Are you my father ?” the kids keep asking. For them, and for other survivors—here and there—the Vietnam war isn’t over. It never will be.
Which is part of the reason Larry Rottmann keeps revisiting the war with his art. It’s also why he keeps making all those trips back to a foreign country he admits he fell in love with at first sight, even in the midst of a war. He wants to explain the war’s spiritual and emotional impact on America, he tells me after the show ends. After all, the Vietnam war was the defining event of his generation, just as the Great Depression and World War II defined an earlier generation. So he’s written poems, this play, a novel, even a country-western song, along with doing several documentary films. All of them deal with Vietnam and what it means, even today, so many years later. Near the end of the performance, the cast brings the story of an old war up to date. In mocking a familiar statement that “Iraq isn’t Vietnam,” the narrator lists a number of similarities. His list ranges from deception by the government about the reasons for war, to the war’s unpopularity at home, to the sacrifice borne by a small part of the population. The cast’s chant after each line about the Iraq war drives the point home: “Like Vietnam,” they say. Over and over. They’re different wars, but they’re the same war. These days, all of our wars are the same. Only the geographical details and the cast of characters change. If you know one of our modern wars, you know them all. So Larry Rottmann keeps teaching. If he keeps at it long enough, maybe we’ll finally learn something.
—––––– • –––––—George Arnold is opinion editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette’s northwest edition.
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