In his poem “Song of Napalm,” Việt Nam War veteran Bruce Weigl imagines standing with his wife and watching horses meander peacefully through a meadow, mist kicked up around their hooves, a bucolic scene until unbidden sounds and images from the war begin to churn into his mind: voices “scraped” into the wind by trees whose branches seem to crisscross the sky like barbed wire. “They are only branches,” his wife tells him, trying to get him to stop seeing the war everywhere. “Okay,” he replies. He will “turn his back on the old curses.” He will try to put the war behind him.

But the memories push back, the most vivid and consistent one a girl hit by napalm and burning to death. “She is burned behind my eyes,” he tells his wife.

and not your good love and not the rain-swept air
and not the jungle green
pasture unfolding before us can deny it.

— Weigel, Bruce, “Song of Napalm” in Song of Napalm, Atlantic Monthly Books, 1988

Images of the children damaged and destroyed by the war haunt much of the poetry of Vietnam veterans, as they haunt the minds of so many veterans of that war, fought as it was among a civilian population that we nearly destroyed in the cause of saving them from themselves.

The girl is burned behind Weigl’s eyes, just as another girl is burned behind the eyes of Sergeant Brandon Just, USMC (Floyd, Bryan Alec, “Sergeant Brandon Just, USMC” in The Long War Dead, The Permanent Press, 1983). She is the only survivor of a misplaced artillery and napalm attack: “a wild wizardry of fire” that “expired her mistake of a village.” Sergeant Just compulsively visits the child in the Đà Nẵng hospital whenever he gets to the rear, standing helplessly in front of her hospital bed:

Her eyes had been removed,
and because they were not there,
they were there
invisibly looking him through . . .
Her tongue, bitten in two while she had burned,
strafing his ears,
saying, without mercy,
I love you.

Since the end of the war, over 105,000 people, a third of them children, have been killed or maimed by the unexploded bombs left in the earth by our “wild wizardry of power” in Vietnam alone; the statistics from Laos and Cambodia (From Project RENEW: “American aircraft dropped over 5 million tons of bombs on Vietnam– the largest bombardment of any country in history—and more than twice as much tonnage as the U.S. Air Force dropped in all of World War II. Over 4 million tons fell on the mostly rural areas of the former South Vietnam, plus 400,000 tons of napalm and 19 million gallons of herbicides. This compares with approximately 2 million tons on Laos and half a million tons on Cambodia.”) are equally terrible, as are those for the generations cursed by what former Army nurse Marilyn McMahon called “the snipers coiled in the strands of my DNA”: the slow poison of Agent Orange and other dioxins and its aftereffects of birth defects and deformities.

When they tell stories to their children
of the evil
that awaits misbehavior
is it me they conjure?

— Ehrhart, W.D. “Making the Children Behave” in To Those Who Have Gone Home Tired, Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1984

What have we learned? What have we not learned?

If the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the war that never really ends is a time to ask those questions, one answer to the first can be found in the example of those veterans who, like Sergeant Just, have looked at the human damage of the war and have taken on themselves, as the agents of that wounding, to be part of its healing.

In addition to their own self-funded charitable organizations, and Vietnamese-run nongovernmental organizations begun through their efforts, lobbying by Việt Nam veterans has played a key role in pushing the United States to take responsibility for wartime damage through USAID and State Department programs, with the latter spending over $750 million on weapon disposal and $430 million on Agent Orange cleanup around the area of the former Biên Hòa Air Base.

Việt Nam veterans, individually or in the organizations they have formed to work with Vietnamese NGOs, have been helping to find and destroy unexploded ordnance, aid victims of Agent Orange, provide educational and economic opportunities for people in some of the most war-damaged areas, and have been pressing the American government—successfully until the efforts of the present administration—to provide funding to all those efforts.

Vietnam Veterans of America works with the Vietnamese Veterans Association providing information about places where the remains of former enemy soldiers can be located. Project RENEW, Vietnamese staffed and run, was co-founded by Chuck Searcy, who worked in Army intelligence during the war, and who is probably the most-loved American in Việt Nam; the organization has found and disposed of tens of thousands of unexploded shells and land mines, mostly in Quảng Trị Province, located just south of the former Demilitarized Zone and the scene of some of the heaviest fighting of the war (See the essay by Ngo Xuan Hien in this series). PeaceTrees Vietnam, created by the families of veterans killed in action, does the same work and also replants forests, and the D.O.V.E. Fund, an organization formed by Việt Nam veterans in Toledo, Ohio, has financed the building of hundreds of schools, clinics, day care centers, water purification projects, and aid for Agent Orange victims, and provided scholarships for over 70,000 Vietnamese students (Full disclosure: I’m an honorary member of the D.O.V.E (Development of Vietnam Endeavors) Fund Board of Trustees). There are other organizations and hundreds of individuals who do similar work (See George Black’s book The Long Reckoning: A Story of War, Peace and Redemption in Vietnam for a comprehensive account of both the damages of war and Vietnam veterans’ healing work in Vietnam.). Their efforts are motivated by responsibility and empathy.

“The fundamental weakness of Western Civilization is empathy,” counters Elon Musk. In late January, as the dismantling of U.S. Agency for International Development began, the State Department ordered “humanitarian demining organizations funded by the department to cease operations ‘effective immediately,’” as part of the war on government service and human empathy. The Trump-Musk administration’s chaotic attempt to destroy State Department support for organizations that locate and clear unexploded ordnance, as well as the USAID Agent Orange cleanup programs, meant to address some of the worst human damage inflicted by us on the civilian populations of Southeast Asia, has already had terrible consequences, including the further killing and maiming of children. At the time I’m writing this, some of the programs are temporarily operational again largely due to personal pleas to Marco Rubio from ex-ambassador to Việt Nam Ted Osius, who was instrumental in initiating the Biên Hòa cleanup. But Trump, Musk and Rubio have made it clear they wish to abolish all humanitarian aid to other countries, and whether or not such efforts will continue to exist will depend, as will so much else, on the Supreme Court.

Many of the cuts to regular VA services initiated by the Department of Government Efficiency have affected veterans’ health care, including psychological services. But although it will clearly be more terrible for the affected civilian population living in the former war zones, the elimination of foreign aid meant to deal with the damage caused by our wars will also damage the veterans who have found peace and purpose in helping the victims of their war. It will damage, as well, the soul of the nation those veterans once represented as warriors and now represent as healers. Former medic George Evans writes:

How tired I am of hearing about that war,
which one should struggle
to keep the nightmare of suffer from rather than forget
I don’t want to heal and am sick of those who do
Such things end in license.

— “Revelation in the Mother Lode,” by George Evans, in Sudden Dreams: New and Selected Poems, Coffee House Press, 1991

On the twenty-fifth anniversary of the war’s ending, I stood with a group of Americans and a group of Vietnamese from the village of Cẩm Thanh in Quảng Trị Province, looking out at a rocky field towered over by ridges of jungled mountains and the dark, looming formation we called the Rockpile during the war. In July of 1966, I’d been part of a Marine task force sent to this area to halt a North Vietnamese Division that had come over the ill-named Demilitarized Zone separating what was then South Việt Nam from what was then North Việt Nam. My squadron and our sister squadron lost four helicopters the first day of Operation Hasting; as the last fell, shot down, the 13 Marines inside burned to death. Later into that month-long battle, my helicopter—I was a gunner—flew a night medevac mission, and we packed the interior of the CH-46 with the wounded and the dead from the fighting that day, all lying tangled on the deck, bleeding into each other’s wounds and into some crevice of my brain, where they remain. I envisioned those entwined bodies as we looked at those hills on the twenty-fifth anniversary: looking at the countryside of Việt Nam when I returned after the war was always like seeing a palimpsest, the past inscribed everywhere just under the fragile scrawl of the present. We were meeting the village officials in order to check out the site of a new, much-needed school, which would be built thanks to the fundraising efforts initiated by my friend John Borman, also a former helicopter gunner who had been on that operation, and who had become a human rights lawyer after the war. Schoolchildren would learn and play against the backdrop of those bloodied hills, still strewn with my memories of those wasted boys and with the deadly debris that was still killing and maiming children.

Healing without learning ignores the cause of the wound. Trauma, as defined by Dr. Judith Herman, causes a break in the life-narrative: we no longer see the selves we thought we were—a concept that can be as true for a country as for an individual, as the aftereffects of the Việt Nam war on our national psyche reveal. The pattern of recovery from trauma Herman describes involves recognizing the wound, articulating and sharing the story of how it was received with listeners willing to be changed by it and incorporate it as learned wisdom within their own life-narratives.

It is a process that may also apply to the way a nation struggles to define what it strives to be.

What have we learned? What have we not learned?

If poetry can express the consciousness and the conscience of a nation, much of the poetry of Việt Nam veterans calls attention to both the presence and prevalence of moral injury from the Việt Nam War, and the shadow it still casts on and in ourselves. It is the Jungian shadow Army veteran Doug Rawlins evokes in the epigraph to his poem “The Girl in the Picture,” the naked 9-year old Phan Thị Kim Phúc screaming as the napalm burns into her back in Nick Ut’s iconic photo of the Việt Nam War. “Of course you will have to ignore her / if you wish to survive over the years,” the veteran in the poem tells himself, but when his own daughter turns 9 and then his granddaughter turns 9, and he sees Kim Phúc standing in the road while he is driving one night, “still naked and nine” and still burning—as she is behind Weigl’s eyes, behind Sgt. Brandon Just’s eyes—he knows that

Now you must stop to pick her up, to carry her back
home to where she came from, to that gentle
village where the forgiving and the forgiven
gather at high noon. There are no shadows.

— Rawlins, Doug, “The Girl in the Photograph” from In the Shadow of the Annamese Mountains, Kellscraft Studio Publishing, 2020.

Healing, as Rawlins’s poem suggests, must begin to occur when the damage in which one participated, the Jungian shadow in ourselves and in our country, is brought into the light through empathy and compassion.

It is healing oneself through the healing of other. It is poetry. It is selfish, and it is altruistic. It is what we can learn from the war. It is what great countries can do. It is what countries that are run as corporations, by men who see empathy as the enemy of profit and the pursuit of profit and power as the only worthy human enterprises, will never see a reason to do.

Wayne Karlin served in the Marine Corps in the Việt Nam War. He has published nine novels, a collection of short stories, and three works of nonfiction: He was the pro bono American editor of the Voices From Việt Nam series for Curbstone Press, a project to publish Vietnamese authors in translations, and the writer and coproducer of the radio program “Artists Born of War,” interviewing American veteran writers and Vietnamese writers, as part of the series Shared Weight. He has received six State of Maryland Individual Artist Awards in Fiction, two Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Paterson Prize in Fiction for 1999, the Vietnam Veterans of American Excellence in the Arts Award in 2005, and the 2019 Juniper Prize for Fiction.