Playing Basketball with the Viet Cong.

• Author: Rothschild, Matthew
• Position: Brief Article

The author served in the Vietnam war during 1968 and 1969, and in this work, he wrestles with his experience then and the emotions he felt upon returning to Vietnam in the 1980s.

"First Casualty" (great title!) is only twenty short lines long, but it haunts. The narrator starts simply enough: "They carried him slowly/down the hill." One soldier said, "Don't mean nothing." But the narrator disagrees:

I swear he followed us

his soul, a surplice

trailing the jungle floor.

In "Body Count: The Dead at Tay Ninh," Bowen uses even a sparer, more matter-of-fact style to depict the grotesque. The poem begins:

We had no place to put them

so we piled them, boots

pointed to the sky,

by the mess tent. By the end of the day, the morbid scene grew even more macabre, as...