Coming home to what?
Homecoming: Images of Vietnam
Collected by Jean R. Williams
Homecoming Publications, 186 Coes Creek Rd, Nambour, 4560
$11.95
Reviewed by Denis Kevans
This is a book of poems on and by the generation of Australian soldiers who fought in Vietnam. Many of them were conscripts.
Conscription for overseas service had been twice defeated by referenda in 1916 and 1917, even though the Nationals, led by Labor turncoat Billy Hughes, were supremely confident of winning.
For Vietnam, the Liberal-National party brought in conscription by a bill in parliament. The referendum was to come, when 500,000 marched through Australia's streets, demanding an end to Australian involvement in the war, and an end to the Vietnam war. This was the war which, in 1954, Uncle Sam took over from the French imperialists, who came back to Vietnam in 1945, after leaving the Vietnamese Army of Resistance to fight the Japanese Imperial Army.
The Vietnamese Army of Resistance held down a couple of Japanese divisions during World War II, thus assisting Australia's fight against Japan. The "Vietnam War" commenced the moment the first French troops set foot in Vietnam in the 19th century, or centuries before that, as Chinese armies tried to invade Vietnam.
This background to the Vietnam War is a framework which might help the confused and depressed Aussie soldier understand what a small pawn he was, among the tiny pawns, fighting for centuries over the territory of Vietnam.
This book of poems about Vietnam, and the crippled, crushed and manipulated Australian and NZ soldiers, who added one more tragedy to the tragedy of war, is full of love. Jean Williams, who collected them, writes of her son Sam, who was conscripted. Jean, and her friends, marched and campaigned against the war. There are many poems by soldiers, asking "Why?", asking forgiveness from invisible tormentors, asking to share in an Australian future, for which, they believe, they gave every ounce of their hearts and souls. This is the anguish in the book.
I wrote my first anti-Vietnam War poem in 1961. I wrote many poems in that period against war and nuclear war. Many were based on the experience of Australians in War, e.g. "The Unknown Soldiers", in World War I.
In 1962, I wrote "The Slouch of Vietnam", a poem I recited and printed many times. It has been reprinted in Vietnam Remembered, and now in Vietnam News. It attacks the use, and misuse, of Australians in war by "Great Powers", e.g. the USA in Vietnam. It is no surprise, then, that apart from "Generals", my own Vietnam and antiwar poems have not made it into Australian poetry anthologies. Homecoming will wrench your heart. But it will not wrench the hearts of politicians, bureaucrats, cozey-dozers and quick-thinking businessmen, who made careers, reputations and fortunes from the throwaway bodies of young conscripts, to "get sweet" with Uncle Sam, who has now thanked us by ripping off our markets and plundering our economy.
The poems in Homecoming are muted screams, caught from afar; they are the sweat, sobs and chem-vomit on the soldier's pillow, whose rehab has not rehabilitated him and never can. His faith and loyalty are to a country in which the rich and super-rich no longer feel for the victims of yesterday, or the victims of today; a country in which those who callously, and with personal calculation, sent him to Vietnam, still draw fat parliamentary salaries.