Learning War: Selected Vietnam War Poems - by R. L. Barth

Publication Date: February 1, 2021
Paperback, 72 pages
ISBN: 978-1-937968-76-2

Available from Small Press Distribution

The Vietnam War happened a long time ago in a place far away. For an entire generation, those known as Boomers, it was one of the most defining events of the age, certainly for all those who fought in it, but also for those who protested against it, and for those who watched it nightly on their TV screens, the first time war was witnessed by the general public in real time, with body counts served alongside the evening meal. It has been the subject of countless books, movies, and documentaries.

Why, then, should we read about it now? The poet R. L. Barth, who as a young Marine experienced the war first-hand, responds,

Because it’s truth. Because it’s history.

History often is the most inconvenient of truths, forcing us to acknowledge what we would prefer to forget, or to remember a different way. And history, we are told, is written by the victors. But the greatest truth of war is that it can never be understood unless it is told by its victims.

In Barth’s poems, victims are given voice. Those who fought, those who died, those who returned wounded and shattered in body and mind, not to parades as heroes, but to a country that too often victimized them a second time, and would not acknowledge their service until many years later.

His poems are often short, bursting with the power of ordnance, like that recounted in “One Way to Carry the Dead,” which reads in its entirety:

A huge shell thundered; he was vaporized
And, close friends breathing near, internalized.

They convey, with elegant efficiency, the horrors and absurdities of war.

And this is most important reason that we need these poems. Barth opens with a quote from George Gascoigne, “That Warre seems sweete to such as raunge it not.” As long as war “seems sweete,” we will forget, and thus repeat, the horror. Thus, as Pound had it, this is “news that stays news,” a lesson to be endlessly repeated until, at last, it may be learned. Until then, we are left with a black slab of memory, “Up Against the Wall”:

These dead troops gave their country fame,
Which country travestied their story.
Now, only kin recall each name;
Only the dead recall their glory.


Praise for Learning War & R. L. Barth

For four decades, I have been reading R. L. Barth’s poems, which bear up, in their admirable craft and deep feelings, as few other poems of our time do. Though Barth favors short poetic forms, particularly the epigram (of which he is a master), his work about the Vietnam War has a Homeric comprehensiveness. He renders vividly the excitement and horror of combat and depicts, with tragic sympathy, the terrifying vulnerability and suffering of civilians swept up in the conflict. At the same time, he has a sharp eye for the absurd and sometimes comic aspects of soldiering, and he can be acidly amusing about the vanity fair of those who profited from the war—the top brass, the politicians, the pro-war and anti-war celebrities. We are fortunate to have his Vietnam poems—formerly scattered among smaller collections and chapbooks—gathered into this single and substantial book.
—Timothy Steele

These poems of our lost war in Vietnam cut to the bone. In the tradition of the poetry of war beginning with Archilochus and Homer’s Iliad, these terse lyrics call war as they see it without an ounce of glorification or patriotic bravado. As deft and accurate as targets seen through a sniper’s lens, they speak with the blunt and lasting authority of hollow-point bullets. Many communicate in tight rhymes, some as heroic couplets that are stark, biting, and truthful—anything but heroic. R.L. Barth’s powerful indictment of war culminates with lines that encapsulate his experience as a combatant: “Why not adjust? Forget this? Let it be? / Because it’s truth. Because it’s history.”
—Richard Taylor

Barth’s earlier books, Deeply Dug In, A Soldier’s Time, Simonides in Vietnam, and Forced Marching to the Styx, dealt with his own experience as a Marine in Vietnam during the American part of the war, after the French defeat. His collections contain some of the finest poems ever written in English on the direct experience of modern war.
—Helen Pinkerton Trimpi, reviewing Barth’s No Turning Back: The Battle of Dien Bien Phu

R. L. Barth is the author of No Turning Back: The Battle of Dien Bien Phu and the editor of The Selected Letters of Yvor Winters, among other books.

He lives in Edgewood, Kentucky, with his wife, Susan.