1667: A Poem | Robert Hass
"A Poem"
Robert Hass
"You would think God would relent," the American poet Richard
Eberhardt wrote during World War II, "listening to the fury of
aerial bombardment." Of course, God is not the cause of aerial
bombardment. During the Vietnam War, the United States hired the
RAND Corporation to conduct a study of the effects in the peasant
villages of Vietnam of their policy of saturation bombing of the
countryside. That policy had at least two purposes: to defoliate the
tropical forests as a way of locating the enemy and to kill the enemy if
he happened to be in the way of the concussion bombs or the napalm
or the firebombs. The RAND Corporation sent a young scholar named
Leon Goure to Vietnam. His study was rushed by the Air Force which
was impatient for results, but he was able to conduct interviews
through interpreters with farmers in the Mekong Delta and the
mountainous hillside farm regions around Hue. He concluded that the
incidental damage to civilian lives was very considerable and that the
villagers were angry and afraid, but he also found that they blamed the
Viet Cong--the insurrectionist army the U.S. was fighting--and not
the United States for their troubles, because they thought of the Viet
Cong as their legitimate government and felt it wasn't protecting them.
Seeing that the bombing was alienating the peasantry from the enemy
Vietnamese, Robert McNamara, the secretary of defense, General
William Westmoreland, the commander in charge of prosecuting the
war, and Lyndon Johnson, the president of the United States, ordered
an intensification of the bombing. In the end, there were more bombs
dropped on the villages and forests of South Vietnam than were
dropped in all of World War II. The estimated Vietnamese casualties
during the war is two million. It was a war whose principal strategy
was terror. More Iraqi citizens have now been incidental casualties of
the conduct of the war in Iraq than were killed by Arab terrorists in
the destruction of the World Trade Center. In the first twenty years
of the twentieth century 90 percent of war deaths were the deaths of
combatants. In the last twenty years of the twentieth century 90 percent
of war deaths were deaths of civilians. There are imaginable responses
to these facts. The nations of the world could stop setting an example
for suicide bombers. They could abolish the use of land mines. They
could abolish the use of aerial bombardment in warfare. You would
think men would relent.
Da begruben wir die Sonne/Es war eine unendliche Sonnenfinsternis
(And then we buried the sun --/it was an endless eclipse of the sun.)
Robert Hass
"You would think God would relent," the American poet Richard
Eberhardt wrote during World War II, "listening to the fury of
aerial bombardment." Of course, God is not the cause of aerial
bombardment. During the Vietnam War, the United States hired the
RAND Corporation to conduct a study of the effects in the peasant
villages of Vietnam of their policy of saturation bombing of the
countryside. That policy had at least two purposes: to defoliate the
tropical forests as a way of locating the enemy and to kill the enemy if
he happened to be in the way of the concussion bombs or the napalm
or the firebombs. The RAND Corporation sent a young scholar named
Leon Goure to Vietnam. His study was rushed by the Air Force which
was impatient for results, but he was able to conduct interviews
through interpreters with farmers in the Mekong Delta and the
mountainous hillside farm regions around Hue. He concluded that the
incidental damage to civilian lives was very considerable and that the
villagers were angry and afraid, but he also found that they blamed the
Viet Cong--the insurrectionist army the U.S. was fighting--and not
the United States for their troubles, because they thought of the Viet
Cong as their legitimate government and felt it wasn't protecting them.
Seeing that the bombing was alienating the peasantry from the enemy
Vietnamese, Robert McNamara, the secretary of defense, General
William Westmoreland, the commander in charge of prosecuting the
war, and Lyndon Johnson, the president of the United States, ordered
an intensification of the bombing. In the end, there were more bombs
dropped on the villages and forests of South Vietnam than were
dropped in all of World War II. The estimated Vietnamese casualties
during the war is two million. It was a war whose principal strategy
was terror. More Iraqi citizens have now been incidental casualties of
the conduct of the war in Iraq than were killed by Arab terrorists in
the destruction of the World Trade Center. In the first twenty years
of the twentieth century 90 percent of war deaths were the deaths of
combatants. In the last twenty years of the twentieth century 90 percent
of war deaths were deaths of civilians. There are imaginable responses
to these facts. The nations of the world could stop setting an example
for suicide bombers. They could abolish the use of land mines. They
could abolish the use of aerial bombardment in warfare. You would
think men would relent.
Da begruben wir die Sonne/Es war eine unendliche Sonnenfinsternis
(And then we buried the sun --/it was an endless eclipse of the sun.)