Remembering: The Last Days in Vietnam

Remembering: The Last Days in Vietnam
Daniel Cano

As another April 30th nears, I recall, a couple of years ago, a colleague asked if I’d say a few words to introduce Rory Kennedy’s film “The Last Days in Vietnam,” which had received excellent movie reviews and was being screened at Santa Monica College where I was teaching at the time.

At first, I declined. I’d had enough of war. Then, after thinking about it more, I reconsidered.

Since the publication of my book Shifting Loyalties in 1993 (click link in title), I’d received letters from Chicano veterans and their families, expressing their gratitude for the stories I’d written about my time in Vietnam. At my readings, many Chicano veterans thanked me for using my voice to give their voices life.

Of all the mainstream books and movies about Vietnam, one would think that Chicanos had no place in the war. I remember teaching a Chicano literature class. We’d been reading Charley Trujillo’s book Soldados and Jorge Mariscal’s Aztlan in Vietnam. A Vietnamese-American student raised her hand to admit she’d never known Chicanos had fought in Vietnam. Her statement perplexed me. It reminded me of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man: no matter how many sacrifices and contributions Americans of color make to this country, we remain invisible.

A letter I’ll always remember was from a Chicana who told me her father had died in Vietnam when she was a child. After reading my book, she said she felt closer to him, understanding what he might have experienced. So, how could I not say a few words to introduce Ms. Kennedy’s film about the Vietnam War’s last days?

For 42 years, I’ve sought a justification for the Vietnam War—or, at least, my role in it.

In 1969, when the Army discharged me, the country was in turmoil over the war, so I pretended that I’d never worn a uniform. I just wanted to hide. But no matter how much I tried to hide, I couldn’t.
Over the years, the reminders were everywhere: Tet, Kent State, The Chicano Moratorium, My Lai, Hearts and Minds, Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter, the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial, Desert Storm, Afghanistan, Iraq, and ISIS.

Since I couldn’t escape, I immersed myself in the study of Vietnam, the land, the people, the history, and politics --always searching, I suppose, for the war’s elusive justification.

April 30, 1975, along with millions of Americans, I watched on television as Vietnam fell to the North Vietnamese communists, or looking at it from our so-called enemy’s perspective, Vietnam’s liberation, the images flickering across the television screen, the last helicopters flying off the rooftop of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon. I felt ill--then angry, bitter, and finally betrayed. “What a waste it had all been,” I’d thought.

How ironic that the Vietnamese student told me she didn’t know Chicanos had fought in Vietnam, when we now know the first American to be captured by North Vietnam was a pilot, Chicano Everett Alvarez, and the last American out of Vietnam was Chicano Marine Sgt. Juan Vasquez. Then there were the thousands of Chicanos who gave life and limb in those sweltering jungles.

After I watched Saigon fall, I refused to vote, to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, or to hold my hand over my heart during the National Anthem. I hid the Army in a cardboard box: the photos, medals, and citations. I didn’t want my son or any of my nephews seeing them and glamorizing war.

As the years passed, I asked myself, if communism was the justification for war, why then did Nixon open relations with communist China? Why did the Soviet Union and East Germany collapse under their own weight? Why do we trade with Vietnam and open relations with Cuba (finally)? Why did we kill two-million Vietnamese and sacrifice nearly 60,000 Americans and bring so much pain and suffering to so many families? (And that’s not counting the terror wrought on Nicaragua, Honduras, and El Salvador under the auspices of salvation from communism.)

In 1995, the ex-Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara published his memoir, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam. “The lessons,” I considered the phrase, as if the slaughter in Vietnam had been some sort of scholarly exercise. McNamara concluded his memoir by telling us how to do it better next time. I took his thesis to be, “Sorry. Looking back on it, we made a terrible mistake.”

As early as 1967, McNamara realized the war was wrong, even immoral. He pressured President Johnson to end it. By speaking out, McNamara found himself booted from his job as Secretary of Defense and reassigned to head of the World Bank.

We now know that many politicians and generals knew early on that the war was unwinnable. But they, too, remained silent and allowed the massacre to continue.

So, who was benefiting from this war? How many millions went into the pockets of Colt and other weapons’ manufacturers and the corporations that supplied the uniforms, vehicles, food, and supplies? In the Golden Triangle, the sale of opium and heroin flourished (but that’s a whole different story).

A few years ago, as I walked through a local bookstore, I noticed a title glaring at me from the stack-- The Tiger Force: A True Story of Men at War.

My artillery battery supported a recon outfit called the Tiger Force, guys we admired, wild, insanely brave men (mostly kids, really), who’d go into the jungle in small groups and sometimes initiate contact with much larger forces.

I thumbed through the pages. Sure enough, it was the same Tigers that we had supported. Maybe I’d find a justification for the war in these pages.

Instead, I read that from June through October 1967, in the pastoral Song Ve River Valley, after communist forces had killed the most experienced Tigers, the remaining Tigers, many inexperienced recruits, took their revenge by executing, in the most heinous ways, hundreds of Vietnamese farmers, and civilians. The Tigers who had self-destructed, turned rice paddies and farms into blood-soaked fields. And it hadn’t been a secret. The brass knew but didn’t stop them, in fact, in some cases, they ordered it.

“June through October 1967,” I remember thinking. That’s when I was there.

My artillery battery supported the Tigers. So, when they called in artillery strikes, was it for fun, to just to watch the villages burn? It was my job to remove those shells from the canisters and hand them to the gun crews who loaded them into the Howitzers and send them crashing into those villages.

What sin had those villagers committed to deserve such a fate? They refused forced removal from their farms and hamlets into filthy, unsanitary compounds the military called Relocation Camps.
How much blood is on my hands? Can I be like Robert McNamara and say, “Well, in retrospect….”? Can I pass it off as a lesson learned?

A reporter who saw McNamara years later said he looked like a “haunted man.”

For me, like many veterans, the Vietnam War is not abstract or theoretical. It isn’t an academic problem. It’s as visceral as a fist in the gut. That’s why it is difficult for many of us to talk about it. I can’t think about Vietnam without thinking of myself in it.

As I watched, Rory Kennedy’s film, “The Last Days in Vietnam,” I had hoped I might find the justification for that war.

But no, though it is a beautiful, uplifting movie, when I exited the theater, I found no justification, not even in the faces of those Vietnamese desperately seeking escape at the American Embassy, or, surprisingly, on the faces of the South Vietnamese throngs waving communist flags to welcome the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese into Saigon.

As another April 30th crawls closer, I wonder if has anything changed? We see the same desperation on the faces of Syrians, Afghanis, Yeminis, and Iraqis. Maybe, in the end, we should heed Lennon’s words and “give peace a chance.”

Editor's note: La Bloga implored Bloguero Daniel Cano to share his decorations and badges from his service in the United States Army because these are important parts of his, and the nation's, histories.  Lest we forget: only 7% of the population ever wore the uniform.

La Bloga salutes the men and women who served and shed blood in foreign wars. 

Daniel observes, "Vietnam vets still suffer from society's mixed messages of pride and humiliation."

Alfredo Véa in Pasadena. News&Notes. Heartbroken/mended Poets in NELA

Michael Sedano

Book Club of Stanford Raza Alumni, SoCal
front: Juanita Naranjo, Margie Hernandez, Concepción Valadez.
back: Angelique Flores, Manuel Urrutia, Roberto Cantu, Michael Sedano.

Southern California’s Stanford Latina Latino Alumni Book Club enjoyed the company of Alfredo Véa recently. The club read a pair of Véa’s novels, La Maravilla (1993), and Gods Go Begging (1999). Roberto Cantu, whose friendship with Véa made possible the invitation, joined the group.

Cantu points out that, with The Silver Cloud Café, the trilogy constitutes a Chicano Buddenbrooks, in that the three novels track the career of the Beto character from a boy in Arizona to a criminal defense attorney in San Francisco, haunted by the lawyer’s time at war in Vietnam.

The author was highly engaging in his discussion of those novels, his upcoming work, and answering questions about his process:

Véa doesn’t employ an outline; he goes at the process a todo dar and would be handcuffed if he had to follow an outline. Characters grow out of the writer’s mind and experiences as well as the characters’ own demand to be given life. Exhaustive research is the fundament of all effective writing; a writer has to know what she or he is writing about.

Most obvious in the development of a book is the author’s life. Véa sat at the dining table at Barbara and Michael Sedano’s chante, quietly telling the Stanford alumns of the fear an infantryman experiences as a helicopter descends in the pre-dawn darkness, knowing there’s an ambush waiting.

Rounds pound into the bottom of the huey penetrating into the cabin as the machine approaches the ground; how a soldier in combat can be talking to a friend and in an instant see the man’s face ripped off his head when a bullet finds it.

Véa served in the Americal Division with other raza, with black soldiers, and Okie working-class boys. Daily attacks, vicious fire fights, 30 dead adversaries for each GI KIA marks the US’ bloodiest Division in Vietnam.

That 1:30 kill ratio math was unnecessary—we knew then, we know now. The experience sends the author into literary flights of “what if” fiction. What if there was a machine that could rewind events, go back in time to change one small thing? There’s a novel in the notion.

Alfredo Véa’s next novel, Mexican Flyboy, comes to the public March 2016. The Stanford raza alumni barely controlled their enthusiasm at the prospect of reading the author’s newest work. If nothing changes in the current timeline, the group looks forward to inviting Mr. Véa back for another spirited, and at times raucous, tertullia.

Southern California Stanford raza alumni who enjoy reading Latina Latino writers and discussing same while sipping fine wines and enjoying good chow, and who want to learn more about the book club’s activities, click here.


News & Notes

San Marcos TX
Tomás Rivera Award At Twenty

Daniel Guerrero, Mayor of San Marcos, Texas issued a proclamation designating September 26, 2015 as Tomás Rivera Children's Book Award Day. Per the organizers, the proclamation reflects a collaboration between The City of San Marcos, Texas State University, San Marcos CISD, Texas AFT, and the Tomás Rivera Children's Book Award--working together to make a spectacular 20th anniversary celebration of the book award.

The conference will be on September 25 and registration closed because it filled to capacity.

The fair is September 26 and is free and open--so everyone come to the San Marcos Public Library and the San Marcos Activity Center from 10:00am--3:00pm on that Saturday.

The organizers urge gente to arrive early and join the parade! There will be a parking shuttle at the Coliseum Lot on Aquarena and Charles Austin streets.



Chicago IL
Sor Juana All Month Long and Then Some

As September's song approaches its final coda, two months remain in Chicagoland's ongoing celebration of the American genius poet, scholar, imagined larger-than-life figure,  Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.

Visit the festival's website to select interesting activities from a large menu of choices.


Los Angeles CA
Read Your Stuff Aloud Workshop

La Bloga's Michael Sedano will conduct this workshop at Avenue 50 Studio in Los Angeles' Highland Park. Sedano conducted read your stuff aloud workshops at the National Latino Writers Conference, and writes regularly about performance in conjunction with his foto project that aims to photograph every Los Angeles poet or writer in front of an audience, until he captures what he calls "the perfect public speaker portrait."

Sedano is a lifelong oral communication teacher and coach. He holds a Ph.D. in Communication Arts and Sciences from the University of Southern California. Michael Sedano retired from the world of work where he was responsible for the communication strategies and practices of an international corporation.

Here are details from Avenue 50:

To reserve your spot just make a donation of ANY amount. You can pay as little as you can or as much as you'd like. The suggested donation is $5.00. Each donation will be good for ONE reservation. Your donations help to support literary arts programming, making workshops like these accessible for the entire community - now and in the long term at Avenue 50 Studio. We look forward to seeing you at the workshop.

Click here to reserve your seat.
Click here to reserve your seat.

Click here to reserve your seat.

Heartbreak3: Reading From The Anthologies

Heartbreak has been a labor of love, and heartbreak, for Karineh Mahdessian, for much of 2015.

When Mahdessian, who organizes the popular monthly La Palabra readings, issued an open call for heartbreak poetry the flood of responses allowed Mahdessian to divide the project into three anthologies, a women's heartbreak anthology, a men's heartbreak anthology, and a couples' anthology:

Ache (women's anthology)--$7
Blaque (men's anthology)--$9
Fuse (combined anthology)--$8
Click here for information on purchasing your copies of all three, or a select volume.

A hot humid Saturday night arrived at Avenue 50 Studio, along with a standing room only audience who came with open hearts, broken hearts, mending hearts, and heartfelt poetry.

Presenting that evening were 35 poets and one infant (who sang throughout the evening before making her debut in dad's arms.) La Bloga attended camera in hand, and managed to capture some of the names to go with their faces. Apologies to the artists whose portraits appear in today's gallery, unnamed. La Bloga-Tuesday will update the captions as I match the names to the images, who include:

Don Kingfisher Campbell and Maja Trochimczyk, Jessica Ceballos, Dennis Cruz, Annette Cruz and Heather Parker, Kelly Grace Thomas and Donny Jackson, Nelson Alburquenque, Regina Higgins, James Maverick, Teresa Mei Chuc, Seven Dhar, Dane Baylis, Mariella Sanchez, T. Akira, Emily Fernandez, Toti O'Brien, Ángel García, Lisbeth Coiman, Peter J. Harris and Iris De Anda, Luis Antonio Pichardo and Trista Hurley-Waxali, Christopher Wayne Thompson, Imrith Rode'America, Luivette Resto and Reynaldo Macias, Mario Angel Escobar and Gloria Enedina Alvarez, Abel Salas and Jasmin Iraheta, Michael Ian Churchman, Sean Hill, Dragn Billy, and Jesus Aldana-Alba.

The Named

Abel Salas, Jasmin Iraheta

C.E. Jordan

Alexandra Hohmann, C.W. Thompson 

Angél García

Dane Baylis

Donny Jackson, Kelly Grace Thomas

Peter J. Campbell, Iris De Anda

Luivette Resto, Reynaldo Macias 

Karineh Mahdessian, Jesús Aldana-Alba

Jessica Ceballos

Gloria Enedina Alvarez, Mario Angel Escobar

Sean Hill

Seven Dhar

Toti O'Brien

Don Kingfisher Campbell, Maja Trochimczyk

Imrith Rode’America, Judith Rode'America

Las y Los Unidentifieds - If you are pictured, please send your name to La Bloga-Tuesday.

Foto notes: in difficult lighting situations like this, I set the camera to manual settings. These are set for ISO to 3200, 1/25 f/4.5. The Canon T2i adjusts the aperture in response to a poet moving into or out of the various illumination "hot spots".  The relatively slow shutter requires a steady finger on the release switch, and holding the camera firmly, to minimize shake and camera movement.

Readers who are tied to the manuscript rarely make eye contact with their listeners.  Techniques to overcome this are something the "Read Your Stuff Aloud" workshop addresses.

Reviews: Billy in wartime. Banned books update. Floricanto on the eve of independence.

Satire loads up on rich targets

Review: Ben Fountain. Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk. New York : Ecco, 2012.

Isbn 9780060885595 0060885599

Michael Sedano

It’s about time someone came up with a good satire of the Bush Iraq war years, something Ben Fountain accomplishes in his Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk. It's a grand satire that should lead readers to ask what is the value of a soldier's life? Why are our troops not yet home?

Billy Lynn is an east Texas boy, one of those rangy cowboy types with a keen mind and a Texas public school education. In other words, Billy’s not dumb, he’s just been raised that way. Trouble is, a keen mind keeps Billy looking at context and searching for something that looks normal to him.

Here he is at nineteen years old touring the nation to strike up enthusiasm for Bush’s Iraq war. Mired in a sea of people slapping his back or teary-eyed to meet the hero, people treat him like an object. The big shots who come on to Billy’s heroism—“you’re the one with the medal”—don’t give a moco for Billy but they’re proud that it was one of their own, a Texas boy, on teevee, fighting off an attack, Billy the guy with a soldier dying in his lap. Such heroism, sacrifice, killing, makes them proud that nina leven is getting some payback and pose for a picture on my iPhone.

The welter of stilted conversations, ritual greetings, and gushing admiration boils down in Billy’s experience to the question Fountain puts in his mind. “Why do you do this for us?” Billy, stunned in realizing this owner’s suite hell is normal to these people, is shaken to the core with no answer. To his infant nephew he sends a message: if I’m not around you tell him, I said don’t ever join the Army.

Billy’s Sergeant Dime has the best lines in the story. Dime is a scion of the 1% who’s chosen a decent man’s life as a grunt. His life lets Dime stand toe-to-toe with rich guys and even Norm himself. Dime does the thinking Bravo follows orders.  Billy doesn’t have the words so it’s Dime's role to provide a rant when it’s called for, as when a pig of an oil man imagines how hard a combat soldier’s life treats him.

“That’s not it at all! We like violence, we like going lethal! I mean, isn’t that what you’re paying us for? . . .  . I love every one of these mutts like a brother, I bet I love them more than their mommas even, but I’ll tell you frankly, and they know how I feel so I can say this right in front of them, but just for the record, this is the most murdering bunch of psychopaths you’ll ever see. I don’t know how they were before the Army got them, but you give them a weapons system and a couple of Ripped Fuels and they’ll blast the hell out of anything that moves. Isn’t that right, Bravo? . . .  . So if your family’s oil company wants to frack the living shit out of the Barnett Shale, that’s fine, sir, that’s absolutely your prerogative, but don’t be doing it on our account. You’ve got your business and we’ve got ours, so you just keep on drilling, sir, and we’ll keep on killing.” (66)

Fountain sets his plot in motion around a movie deal. Here’s another side to Billy’s fundamental questions about this war, what is a soldier worth?

A producer has latched on to the Bravos, but he cannot close a deal. For the soldiers, there’s no money up front, but once a star and studio climb aboard, the producer has the men thinking they are worth hundreds of thousands of dollars each. For working class men, the sum has value as mere fantasy, like hooking up with a Dallas cheerleader.

Each of the men of Bravo squad, except for SGT Dime, escaped a crappy life by picking up the recruiter’s inkpen. As excited at the prospect of movie money as getting a lapdance from Beyoncé, the Bravos occupy whatever moment is at hand. They depend on their Sergeant, and Billy, to see the deal through. Fatalistic, they’ll take whatever someone’s willing to pay.

That’s a good choice for Fountain. The author doesn’t have to develop those characters beyond a gesture or a feel-good experience. When the tour is over, Fountain and the Army are sending them back to Iraq, where such questions--why and is it worth it--are absurd.

The title comes from the end of the novel. After a grotesque freak show in Norm’s suite, the Bravos descend to another hell, the march into a halftime spectacular where their duty calls on them to serve as mannequins in uniform to Destiny’s Child.

Chaos ensues and the Bravos have to fight their way out of this support the troops hell.  Now Fountain plays his stroke of pure cruelty to the hilt. The Bravos survive another ambush in the parking lot then load into the white Hummer headed directly to the airport and the return flight to Iraq.

Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk delivers the same flavor irony Charlie Trujillo flavors his Dogs From Illusion about Vietnam Veterans. Trujillo’s infantrymen return home to their old jobs picking melons and being cheated by their boss. Fountain really twists the pinch here, putting the Bravos through this crap then sending them back into it with the best offer for their lives. In a delicious scene, Billy watches Dime unmask super-patriot Norm. To support the war, Norm’s willing to make a $30 million dollar movie and pay each Bravo $5500.

This is plain mean, Mr. Fountain, but a stiletto of a point. $5500 is less than half the value of a GI’s life insurance policy. Every soldier has that insurance number engraved in active memory. This is how much I’m worth. A living Bravo is worth half what a dead Bravo’s worth. Oh say can you see it now?

One mark of capable satire is its ability to lead readers to ponder what makes authors and characters passionately angry? Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk is not a war story about heroes and duty. These guys are soldiers so we know they will follow orders.

Fountain wants to inquire into the reader’s duty.

What is it, in us, as United States Americans that we allow people like Bush, and Norm and his friends in the owner’s suite, to send out boys like Billy and Mango to kill and die in our name? When people say “I support the troops,” this is what that looks like in dollars and real world common sense, fifty-five hundred dollars for you, millions for me.

So why do we ask them to do it, soldiers?

Much as I enjoy the novel, Fountain leaves me with an equivocal enthusiasm for the deserter ploy, and the constant distraction built into "Billy" as an allusion to Billy Pilgrim, and Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five. Il miglior fabbro.

Fountain sets up a red herring using as support Billy’s asshole father, abused mother, children, and a sister’s plea that Billy desert. Had the author carried through this bit of cheap agon, it would have been the worst case of character assassination since the upcoming presidential election against Obama. There is never a question that Billy or any Bravo would desert, but it sends up a smokescreen for readers who don’t see that not happening. Billy is not going to desert, the Bravos are not going to quit.

It’s up to the nation’s Rubens to support the troops by voting the Norm tipas tipos out of power and bring the troops home. Ruben’s the chicano food worker who invites Mango and Billy to share a joint on a private stadium overlook. The two soldiers and the vato pass the number, offering a singular measure of Ruben’s admiration for the troops. Here, Fountain’s storytelling skills rise toward the sublime. When Ruben explodes outraged learning Billy and Mango are headed back to Iraq, the scene brings tears to a reader, realizing this is what “support the troops” looks like, helpless outrage.

The hallmark of satire is irony. And that’s irony.

 Review: A Vietnam Veteran's memoir and a friend named Billy 

Eraldo Lucero. Echoes of a Distant Past. Screaming Eagles. Vietnam War Memoirs, 1969-70. Pena Blanca NM: Eraldo Lucero, 2012.

Isbn 9781466360396

Michael Sedano

Back in 1969, a month after the Army sent me to live atop a Korean mountaintop missile site, the Army sent Eraldo Lucero to Vietnam. 

There, the Eleven Bravo—Army code for a grunt—from New Mexico would earn the Combat Infantryman Badge and other medals during a year humping hills and jungles, eventually finishing his tour on a pair of remote mountaintops in the final major battle of the Vietnam war.

Lucero’s memoir provides a fit counterpart to a reading of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk. 

Where violence and warfare come with a literary glitz, the writer struggles not to glorify war, killing, and the death of friends. Fountain doesn’t make it, his story, and not having been a soldier, constrains his fingers, leading to a glorious accounting of the attack and rescue caught by Fox teevee news cameras and making Billy and the Bravos heroes.

In recent US war literature, Chicana and Chicano writers are among the most effective, including Vietnam Veterans Charlie Trujillo, Dogs From Illusion; Alfredo Vea, Gods Go Begging; Daniel Cano Shifting Loyalties. 

Echoes of a Distant Past reads like Lucero and you sitting down and telling each other’s stories. This is mine, he says, and tells it. The writer Lucero doesn’t inject his memories with glitz or hyperbole.

Lucero’s pages lead a reader chronologically from in-country orientation to his first hostile fire, then from trail to ambush, battle to battle, night attacks and the occasional pendejada. He speaks in quiet, matter-of-fact declaratives. This is what happened to me.

You may know vatos who fought the war in Vietnam, and likely they don’t do a lot of talking about it. Maybe a friend gets up and quietly leaves the room when someone starts talking about a book they read about the war. Maybe you have a friend who enjoys Ben Fountain’s fictive Billy but would not be OK with Eraldo Lucero’s memories of his friend Billy.

Except for those Veterans with good reason to shy away, reading Echoes of a Distant Past fills-in knowledge that is beginning to disappear from the body politic. Lucero wants this knowledge to disappear or at least diminish for him. He says he writes to get this stuff out of his system. In whatever manner expression fulfills an exigency, memoirs like this deserve to be written, as well as have a place alongside novels and short fiction.

Novels tell stories at a distance, in belletristic dramatic relief. A memoir like this doesn’t draw characters, it remembers friends, events, details, like relentless grunt quotidiana of being the first soldier to walk into a field of fire, losing friends, who was where when the sappers attacked:

At this point, I remember hearing Roy Larison opening up with his M-60 machine gun. Hank Trickey was in the same foxhole with Larison, just a little to the left of my foxhole and assisting him with the machine-gun fire. As soon as they began firing, I noticed the satchel charges moving away from my position and now exploding on their position. To this day, I’ve felt that they saved my life that night. . . . at 7:30 or 8:00 a.m. as we came out of our foxholes, the situation within our perimeter was extremely chaotic. Guys were still yelling for the medics from all different directions within the perimeter.

Although Echoes of a Distant Past, as most self-published work, would benefit from detailed editing, there’s no missing the numbing authenticity of a soldier’s story, such as when an aging Veteran learns the details of a friend’s death.

Lucero and Billy, Billy Lucas, were tight. Billy is assigned to a new unit, where he is killed. Thirty five years later, Lucero meets a man who’d been in that unit, and who tells Lucero about that time when “Kentucky” got hit in the forehead. That’s what it’s like to be a soldier, sometimes. Die without a name.

Billy Lucas, QEPD.

And QEPD the fifty-five names that close the memoir beginning on page 125. KIA, Killed in Action, with the 2/502^nd Infantry Battalion in Operation Texas Star, including Hills 714 and 882. Many of these men are ¡Presente! in the pages of Echoes of a Distant Past. Read the names. Qepd.

News & Notes Update: Zócalo Poet Laureate Video

La Bloga shared a trio of fotos recently of California Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera at his Zócalo evening.  As promised, click here to navigate to the full video of Herrera’s engaging talk.

Banned Books Update

Freedom's flag in the dawn's early light

Amid the tumult raised in the wake of the Supreme Court's tax decision and letting the lower court resolve the "show me your papers" issue, the books and culture that formerly nurtured the successful Mexican American Studies Program in Tucson Unified Schools continue being banned from classrooms and student's minds.

A thought-eating bacterium appears to have spread from Arizona to Texas, where education policy makers don't want to challenge a student's fixed beliefs, so they want to ban teaching the kids to think for themselves.

On-Line Floricanto Day Three of Month Seven 2012

It’s the eve of the United States of America’s Independence Day from England. That’s the revolución that killed a bunch of Europeans and some locals so thereafter all of us would be equal.

Call that one of history’s bigger ongoing ironies.

Caviling fools and pinheads fill the air with complaints that freedom is a limited commodity, especially in Arizona. If justice continues to prevail, the whines heard round the world from angry right wingers sounds their last gasp.

La Bloga's On-Line Floricanto on the eve of US Independence Day brings the voices of five poets sounding out loud confident defiant: Odilia Galván Rodríguez, Jorge Alejandro Medina, Joe Navarro, Julie Corrales, Fernando Rodriguez.

“Becoming Visible” by Odilia Galván Rodríguez

"Mi color es un crimen" por Jorge Alejandro Medina

“She Did All the Right Things” by Joe Navarro

“Hasta la Victoria” by Julie Corrales

"Letter to Arpaio" by Fernando Rodriguez

Becoming Visible

Odilia Galván Rodríguez

no longer invisible

you wish to banish us

back in time

to our quiet place

stooped in fields

in your gardens

kitchens loud

clattered and steam filled

laundry rooms

quietly nurturing

you and yours like our own

children

lucky if left with family

less so if latchkeyed

lonely and locked in

scared to make a sound

lest neighbors call

authorities

living in fear

of offending

of being visible

time and struggle

changed that game

people learned their rights

to fight for what is just

to come out into the light

c/s

Mi color es un crimen

Jorge Alejandro Medina

Mi color es un crimen

Duermo con el miedo a mi lado

Mientras veo venir el tren

Se olvidan que todos fuimos lodo.

Arranco esperanza de la esperanza

Todo parece que somos un número

Me quieren castigar por mi raza

Pero si Dios fue primero.

Los míos me acogen con sus brazos

Nada está perdido para la luz encendida

Se parecen a la furia de los osos

Pero no podrán con la caridad espléndida.

El fuego cae y sólo es ruido

Mis entrañas se retuercen

Y pienso en lo que fue el nido

Mis labios callados gritan a los que se enfurecen

Todo será tranquilad y vida

Algún día seguro que respiraré la paz

Será existencia real y a los demás dirigida

Sólo pienso en el amor y en hacer eso capaz.

She Did All the Right Things

by Joe Navarro

She did all the right things...

Studied diligently, worked hard
Academically made great strides
Went throughout school impressing
Her teachers and imbued
Her padres with orgullo

She was the student everyone
Knew would succeed and the
Student every teacher bragged
About in the teachers' lounge

She did everything right...
She tearfully explained this
To the arresting officers who
Cuffed her, dragged her to
The jail, where she awaits
Being severed from the only
Home she's ever known for
As long as she can remember

But now faces the prospect
Of being abandoned in an
Unfamiliar place away from
Family and a lifetime of friends

She did all the right things...
And shined brightly, being a
Brilliant star...all the right things
To make her a productive member
Of this society...which does not
Matter in the court of
Ignorance and prejudice

Joe Navarro
© Copyright 2012

Hasta La Victoria

Julie Corrales

Stories untold, weighty on my shoulders

I live the skeletons of history hid from me

You can lie to my face, but not to my condition

I don’t need banned books to know

of disenfranchisement, of my mother’s forced submission

Knelt over shinning porcelain latrines,

Poetry in all her motions, pride in her calloused hands,

Now you deny me her dignity,

call her struggle towards prosperity, stealing of resource and land

call me unpatriotic when I raise my closed fist to sky

demanding what she died for,

earth which should have been my birthright

chronicles burned through genocide

stories and tragedies and triumphs you simply deny

I don’t need your admission, the truth burns under my

Bronze skin and deep in my onyx eyes

The raging fire in my brick red heart, exposes your lies

And we will continue to fight

Until cherry pickers, and babysitters,

House cleaners are heroes memorialized

Till our history is taught to our descendants

And our victory written in a red, white, and blue sky.

Letter to Arpaio

Fernando Rodriguez

Hello Mr. Arpaio

From California the people salute you

Chicano style like in a soccer game

Whistles and boos is what you deserve

The man who thinks himself a legal

The man who wants to apprehend illegals

The man who says he is the law

The only sheriff breaking up laws

Hating immigrants in an immigrant country

Enjoying and hailing an American dinner

No idea you have that an immigrant picked it

So proudly you brag and hail at a State

A state free of immigrants you wish to have

A bunch of dumb people follow you behind

Senseless and with no feelings you seem to be

Breaking up families and breaking up dreams

Asking for papers from people around you

Native Americans ask the same from you

Ironies of life the ones we live today

Attacking the dreams,

Same dreams that brought you here

If an American you’re claiming to be

We are more American we were born here

The American continent is where I’m from

I’m sorry Arpaio I don’t expect you to know

Oh one last thing mister don’t call me more names

My mom gave me one and was approved by god.

BIOS

“Becoming Visible” by Odilia Galván Rodríguez

"Mi color es un crimen" por Jorge Alejandro Medina

“She Did All the Right Things” by Joe Navarro

“Hasta la Victoria” by Julie Corrales

"Letter to Arpaio" by Fernando Rodriguez

Odilia Galván Rodríguez, is a poet/activist and healer.  She has been involved in social justice organizing and helping people find their creative and spiritual voice for over two decades.  Odilia teaches creative writing workshops nationally, and is a moderator and one of the founding members of Poets Responding to SB 1070.  She also co-hosts "Poetry Express" a weekly open mike with featured poets in Berkeley, CA

Hola mi nombre es Jorge Alejandro, el profesor Francisco X me dijo que quería publicar mi poema en la revista Bloga, con gusto acepto esta nominación y sólo me queda decir gracias, recién escribí en ingles  un poco sobre mi, pero le comento  que el inglés no es mi primer idioma aunque tengo un tiempo viviendo acá en U.S.A en si mi vida me la he llevado viviendo más tiempo en México que acá, le cuento un poco sobre mi, estudié filosofía en el Seminario Diocesano de Tijuana, me gradué apenas un año atrás, lo que me inspira escribir poemas es la realidad y la interpretación tan diferente que le podemos dar sin que pierda su esencia,  los sufrimientos y los esfuerzo que las personas hacen para sobrevivir suele ser un algo muy cautivante y detonador, también escribo sobre política o el amor, etc. solo me queda decir muchas gracias.!!


Hi, let me introduce myself, my name is Jorge Alejandro Medina, Francisco X Alarcon, told me about the nomination of my poem to be on The Bloga magazine, let me say little bit more about me, well   I have a bachelor in Philosophy from Seminario Diocesano de Tijuana, I used to work as seminarist in some communities from Baja California,  now I work in L.A., I would say that I found my passion about writing poems a few years ago, I really enjoy doing it,  my inspirations come from watching  our reality and how people suffers  and struggles every day with it, also,  I can write about  love, politics and different stuff or themes.
Thanks for like my poems.

Alejandro Medina.

Joe Navarro is a literary vato loco, teacher, poet, creative writer, husband, father and grandfather.  Joe integrates his poetic voice with life's experiences, and blends culture with politics.  His poetic influences include the Beat Poets, The Last Poets, Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Alurista, Gloria Anzaldua, Lalo Delgado and numerous others.

Julie Corrales is a first-generation American born to a Mexican mother and Costa Rican father.  Raised in City Heights, the poorest and most predominantly Hispanic neighborhood of San Diego, California, Julie navigated a world of drugs, gangs, and poverty. A mother at 15, she dropped out of school and began working, determined to provide more opportunities for her son. After much growth and sacrifice, today Julie raises two sons, works,  writes, studies, and remains politically active in San Diego. She draws on her experiences to advocate for and write about Chicano issues. Julie's essays have been published in the San Diego Union Tribune and local bi-lingual publication La Prensa San Diego. Her first-born son is an artist, musician, athlete, and straight-A student at James Madison High School.

My name is Fernando Rodriguez and I am a student at Merced college Los Banos Campus. Born in Mexicali B.C. Mexico and Raised in Salinas Ca. I grew up in a city with diverse ethnicity, it was then and there where I learned about Chicanismo. I had a struggle to find out who i was, therefore I released my emotions in a piece of paper, not knowing I was writing poetry. One day while in Summer in an English class, the teacher announces a poet will come to town and that we are all invited. After that, I got this passion for writing about everything I can, because I learned written word are as powerful as a weapon. Special thanks to my friend Mrs. Meg Withers for supporting and believing in me and everything i do, and to Mr. Javier X. Alarcon for giving me that boost and showing me real poetry that day.

Veterans Day 2008. The Pit from Pole to Pole.

Michael Sedano
US Army, 1969-70
B 7/5 & Hq 7/5 HAWK (Korea)

One of my earliest memories of war veterans takes me back to my father and mother loading up the Plymouth with water and food for the long drive from Redlands to the Long Beach or Los Angeles Veterans Hospitals. Our next door neighbor, Mr. Gardner, survived mustard gas attacks in WWI, only to spend his days next door to us a nearly blind invalid, sitting in his living room as Mrs. Gardner did all the yard work, household chores.

My Dad, a WWII veteran, explained our treks as an obligation he had to a fellow veteran with no way of getting to the hospital. If we didn’t take Mr. Gardner to the Veterans Hospital, and if Mr. Gardner didn’t get his treatments, he’d die. So we’d drive him. Mr. Gardner sat wheezing next to me. Now and again he would tell me in his whisper voice about the battlefield and his inability thirty years later to fill his lungs with a deep breath of clean (in the 1950s) Redlands air. One day we drove Mr. Gardner to the hospital, and drove back home to Redlands without him. I never saw “old Mr. Gardner” again.

Looking back, I understand Mrs. Gardner, too. She had a good heart. She once told me a chilling story of an apparition that followed her home one night, back when she was a girl in Arkansas. Years later, when I first heard Der Erklönig, Mrs. Gardner’s tale provided the frame of reference. But back then, I thought she was a crazy old woman, remonstrating loudly her dog Rito. “Now see here, Rito, I told you not to do that, do you hear me?” She wasn’t crazy, just defeated. Mrs. Gardner, too, was a victim of the attack that mutilated Mr. Gardner’s eyes and lungs.

This is not my story alone, nor is it unique. The current administration is creating thousands of Mr. and Mrs. Gardners.

As of October 4, 2008, icasualties.org counts thirty-four thousand four hundred twentysix war casualties. 34,426. Include “non hostile” injured, the total reaches 69,390 Mr. and Mrs. Gardners.

This is not to ignore the almost four thousand two hundred killed—QEPD—but they won’t require VA medical services, these veterans already have all the land they need.

I was thinking about Mr. and Mrs. Gardner at a menudo breakfast the other morning with some of my fellow veterans. One ex-Marine recounted his frustration that political machinations are stealing land from veterans, placing it in private hands. The Department of Veterans Affairs West Los Angeles Healthcare Center sits on 388 acres deeded "in perpetuity" for Veterans health care. Abutting the exclusive Brentwood barrio of West Los Angeles, the land has been coveted by private interests for years—already a commercial laundry, theatre complex, and private school athletic facilities occupy veteran land.

The veteran sadly explained how his Congressman, Henry Waxman, helped a non-Veteran group, the hubris-overloaded, mis-named "Veterans Park Conservancy,” seize 16 beautiful acres of canyon and oak forest, converting this from land that would have served injured, PTSD, and disabled Vets, into a cozy park for locals. Compare the scandal that erupted at Walter Reed last year that was laid, rightfully, at the feet of the Republican administration. This gift of Veterans land constitutes an ugly acknowledgment of the failure of the Democratic Party to defend the nation's war injured. Here’s a website that goes into all the sadly disgusting details of this land grab.

There’s little hope that veterans will regain control of that stolen land, but ample hope the new administration genuinely cares for its soldiers and veterans. But you gotta keep 'em honest. As a result, the Marine has begun to expand his horizon from the stolen land to finding ways to bring veterans issues into the public eye. After all, Waxman and his land-grabbing subversives pulled off their movida because no one is keeping an eye on veterans health.

Taking a cue from the 1960s, the ex-Marine is looking to organize returning veterans by means of teach-ins, and today's technology, like Facebook and a blog. Back in the 60s, anti-war activists mobilized on college and high school campuses across the nation by reading and sharing knowledge with like-minded peers. There was no single leader nor traveling pitchmen and women. They taught themselves. What today’s veterans and supporters will need is a curriculum. How to hold and follow-up meetings, agenda boilerplate, informative handouts and lecture materials, recommended reading, websites.

La Bloga’s friends read and understand the power of books. What should modern-day activists read and share with others that will help energize publics about veterans, that could have created an upsurge of public outrage to stop Henry Waxman in his tracks? Certainly practical work like Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals. Patriotic work like Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States. Straightforward insight like Charles Beard’s History of the United States.

Beyond such focused, pragmatic work, I recommend reading the literature of Vietnam. Charlie Trujillo’s novel, Dogs From Illusion, and his oral history, Soldados, offer compelling stories of war. Trujillo frames Dogs in puro irony. A couple of boys from the central valley tire of picking melons and bosses cheating them on wages, so they join up, go to war, and convert into cold-blooded killers. Then they come home to pick the same melons, where the boss welcomes them back by cheating them on their wages. And they have to take it because that’s what they fought for. Equally compelling is Alfredo Vea’s Gods Go Begging. The war episodes raise a sweat for their graphic power. The character’s PTSD lingers thirty years after Vietnam, reducing his social relationships to declivitous, constant struggle. Daniel Cano’s superb collection of stories, Shifting Loyalties, covers the interpersonal pain and aimlessness that plague combat veterans long after their time in country. See also Stella Pope Duarte's Let Their Spirits Dance, with its controversial roll call of Chicano Vietnam war dead, to the exclusion of all the others. Readers not familiar with the impressive library of Chicana and Chicano war literature will find a survey here.

Social disintegration, or failure to re-integrate, is not a theme of fiction but a disastrous consequence of military service. As of early October, US Iraq invasion casualties already number over 69,000. A significant number of these veterans will require ongoing medical rehabilitative care. This is not a guess. Look at the conclusions of the National Academy of Sciences in their publication, Gulf War and Health: Volume 6. Physiologic, Psychologic, and Psychosocial Effects of Deployment- Related Stress. The findings point to growing severity of problems with a proportionate growth in need for services like West LA is supposed to provide.

In cold, scientific phrasing, the report notes, “there is a causal relationship between deployment to a war zone and a specific health effect in humans”. The scientists divide the injuries into those with clear causation between war and later health effects--psychiatric disorders, including PTSD, other anxiety disorders, and depressive disorders, alcohol abuse, accidental death in the early years after deployment, suicide in the early years after deployment, marital and family conflict—and injuries likely caused by exposure to war-- drug abuse, chronic fatigue syndrome, gastrointestinal symptoms, skin disorders, fibromyalgia and chronic widespread pain, increased symptom reporting, unexplained illness, incarceration.

Read the fiction then read the science and find the congruencies. As usual, the artist has it right, depicting all along what society wants to deny, or hide.

David tangled with Walter Reed's image machine when he wanted to attend a ceremony for a fellow amputee, a Mexican national who was being granted U.S. citizenship by President Bush. A case worker quizzed him about what he would wear. It was summer, so David said shorts. The case manager said the media would be there and shorts were not advisable because the amputees would be seated in the front row. " 'Are you telling me that I can't go to the ceremony 'cause I'm an amputee?' " David recalled asking. "She said, 'No, I'm saying you need to wear pants.' " David told the case worker, "I'm not ashamed of what I did, and y'all shouldn't be neither." When the guest list came out for the ceremony, his name was not on it.

Washington Post.

It’s Veterans Day, raza; you know who you are. Celebrate. Be glad you are alive. If you’re a veteran, this is for you:
Attention!
Present, Arms.
Ready, two.
Taps.
At ease.

Fotos: Top. Michael Sedano posing next to a Korean home near Bravo Battery 7/5. Middle, Jane Fonda, Ron Kovic at USC's Tommy Trojan. Bottom: Bob Handy standing up for Veterans land. See link.

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