Len Christensen discusses ‘Song of Napalm’ by Bruce Weigl
‘Song of Napalm’ – by Bruce Weigl (1949-present)
for my wife
After the storm, after the rain stopped pounding,
We stood in the doorway watching horses
Walk off lazily across the pasture’s hill.
We stared through the black screen,
Our vision altered by the distance
So I thought I saw a mist
Kicked up around their hooves when they faded
Like cut-out horses
Away from us.
The grass was never more blue in that light, more
Scarlet; beyond the pasture
Trees scraped their voices into the wind, branches
Crisscrossed the sky like barbed wire
But you said they were only branches.
Okay. The storm stopped pounding.
I am trying to say this straight: for once
I was sane enough to pause and breathe
Outside my wild plans and after the hard rain
I turned my back on the old curses. I believed
They swung finally away from me …
But still the branches are wire
And thunder is the pounding mortar,
Still I close my eyes and see the girl
Running from her village, napalm
Stuck to her dress like jelly,
Her hands reaching for the no one
Who waits in waves of heat before her.
So I can keep on living,
So I can stay here beside you,
I try to imagine she runs down the road and wings
Beat inside her until she rises
Above the stinking jungle and her pain
Eases, and your pain, and mine.
But the lie swings back again.
The lie works only as long as it takes to speak
And the girl runs only as far
As the napalm allows
Until her burning tendons and crackling
Muscles draw her up
into that final position
Burning bodies so perfectly assume. Nothing
Can change that; she is burned behind my eyes
And not your good love and not the rain-swept air
And not the jungle green
Pasture unfolding before us can deny it.
First published in a collection of the same name in 1988, ‘Song of Napalm’ has reverberated in the intervening years as one of the truly great American war poems. Its author, Bruce Weigl, has frequently declared his allegiance to World War I poets, many of whose work acted as models and inspiration for his own writing. Like those earlier poets, Weigl served in combat, in his case in America’s war in Vietnam, a conflict from which he survived and subsequently created a life in the years as a major American poet. His dedication to the care of surviving veterans and his adoption of a Vietnamese daughter as well as his work in publishing translations of poems written by North Vietnamese conflict veterans further confirms that his poetry is fully part of his commitment to understanding the ‘total’ war experience.
‘Song of Napalm’ first stuns the reader with its titular asymmetric combination of a horrible weapon of war, a napalm bomb, and the pleasant sounds of a song. Napalm is an extremely flammable weapon made of gasoline thickened by various soaps that burns very hot. What therefore is there to sing about regarding its use? The second striking feature as the poem opens is his dedication For My Wife. The role of the speaker’s wife will be critical to an understanding of the story of the poem and clearly suggests the impossible burden faced by partners of combat veterans everywhere.
The poem opens with a married couple looking out of their screen door at the horses in the field behind their house after a heavy storm. The husband’s view of their field and the horses is distorted by the “black screen” which triggers painful memories of his war experience. His vision is “altered by the distance,” which could mean the present distance between him and the horses or, in an alternative reading, the distance between Ohio and Vietnam. His understanding of what he is seeing is questionable as he says “I thought I saw,” which itself suggests a lack of clarity. Then the horses possibly become “cut out horses,” not real horses. The unreality of the scene is troubling. He sees strong colors – “the grass never before so blue,” – which could be a realistic view of Midwestern American lands but then the grass becomes “more Scarlet,” which fails to make sense until we realize he is facing a memory from his experiences in the Vietnam War. Trees may not have voices, but soldiers and civilians years before in Vietnam would have had voices, voices he can still clearly hear. Then the branches of the trees become barbed-wire for the troubled speaker. It is at this point that we realize the troubling impact of this painful memory. The wife’s role also now becomes clear – she tells him that the “barbed-wire” he sees is really just a branch of the tree. We empathize with the wife, as she tries to hold her troubled veteran husband back from slipping into these war memories and we come to realize the horrible price a loved one pays for the combat and that they have to face for years afterward.
In the second stanza, the husband attempts to stop himself slipping into his memories of the war. He tries to manage his thoughts although “The storm stopped pounding,” seems odd given how, in the first stanza, the poem had already established that the storm had abated. This storm then is the one in his mind, which he is struggling to control. He recognizes that he is “sane enough” to manage the terrifying thoughts so he is “trying to say this straight.” He is trying to declare victory over his memories by pausing and breathing and turning his “back on the old curses.” This strongly suggests that the vet is not sane much of the time and is desperately trying to prevent the memories from overtaking him again. The ellipses at the end of the stanza indicate perhaps a sense of failure.
The horrible images of his war experience come back to him despite his brave attempts to curb the memories in stanza three. He is now engulfed in his vivid recollection of his war as the “branches are wire” still and the pounding of the storm is really “the pounding mortar.” The inescapable picture is a horrendous one of a young Vietnamese girl running from her village with napalm jelly burning her. This picture immediately recalls the Pulitzer Prize winning photograph taken of a 9-year-old girl (Kim Phuc Phan Thi) running naked from her village after a mistaken napalm attack by “friendly forces” burned the clothes off of her back. Weigl’s poem distorts this universal image somewhat in that the girl here has napalm “stuck to her dress” but the connection to Phan Thi’s experience is nevertheless unmissable. Her hands “reaching for the no one/ Who waits” captures the desperation felt by the little girl, a desperation felt too by the many victims of the American role in the Vietnam War.
The veteran’s wife becomes more critical to the poem in the next stanza. He wants to escape the mental pictures of his war experience and be a normal, loving husband. He says “So I can keep on living, So I can stay here beside you,” clarifying his desire to be a good husband to his loving, understanding wife. His solution to his problem is to “imagine” a different picture than the real one. He imagines the little girl runs down the road – “and wings/ Beat inside her until she rises” – escaping the horror of the burning napalm attack. This imagined outcome allows the girl to fly above the “stinking jungle” and ease her pain. But the veteran’s first concern is to ease “your pain” – his wife’s pain. Relieving his own pain comes after his worry for his wife. This is a veteran who understands that his war experiences continue to plague him and continue to strain the love his wife has for him. He understands that, for his wife at least, the war has never been over.
This attempt to circumvent his war experience and escape the pictures in his brain proves unsuccessful as he quickly recognizes that his imagined memory of the burned girl becomes “the lie.” The “lie swings back again,” captures the dilemma of being trapped between an imagined history and the actuality of what really happened in Vietnam. The reality that has haunted him from combat is what he saw happen to a body burned by napalm, the “burning tendons,” “crackling muscles,” that force a human body to twist into a final, fetal position. This description suggests that the little girl he saw is not Phan Thi, (who thankfully survived) but rather represents a more universal archetype of war victim, given immediacy by the direct observation of what happens to the human body in the presence of napalm.
The key for the vet is that the memory of what he saw in Vietnam was “burned behind my eyes,” suggesting that it cannot be removed despite all efforts. And those efforts, he realizes, are his wife’s loving efforts to comfort him in his misery. A terrible realization for all partners of war-scarred veterans is that the memory of terror is stronger than the dedicated love of that partner. Even a refreshing rain that clears the air over a green pasture in Ohio cannot remove the “jungle green” from this pasture of memory. The horror of war in this poem is the final determination that neither the vet nor his loved one can “deny it” – the song of napalm for this vet is a painful tune that overcomes his ability to imagine a different ending for the burned girl, saddling him with the reality for the rest of his life. Bruce Weigl’s interest in “ordinary people in extraordinary situations” forces a grim conclusion of our ability to understand and live with war.
By Len Christensen