101 Poems Against War: What were they like?  Denise Levertov, 1966

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tudents may be surprised to come across this old war-horse (as it were) from the AQA GCSE Anthology in 101 Poems, but it is a great advantage if you know something about it already. Levertov (1923-1997), though Essex-born, was half-Russian, and became an American citizen in 1955. At the time of Dylan Thomas's Refusal to Mourn... she was in London, working as a civilian nurse and helping victims of the Blitz. War is a constant theme in her poems, and it has to be said she wrote better ones than this, though it is easy to remember and write about.

The rather awkward free-verse form is a series of numbered questions followed by a series of numbered answers, from an apparently authoritative but clueless questioner of the future interviewing a Vietnamese citizen. We know the interviewer has authority because he is called "Sir"; clueless because, for example, he asks if the Vietnamese had "lanterns of stone" - in a country occupied three times by the Chinese, situated in South-East Asia, where anything but lanterns of paper would be considered strange. In 1966, when the poem was written, America had yet to unleash the full force of its military might on the country, so in a sense Levertov's predictions came partially true, although in fact Vietnam recovered to become a Communist state which has voluntarily embraced Capitalism, as can be seen from the picture on the left. One might speculate that this is what would have happened anyway, without the Americans killing 3.000,000 people and destroying 2,000,000 hectares of rainforest. Why did they invade? According to the Americans the issue was idealogical: if Communism wasn't stopped in Vietnam it would spread to the rest of South-East Asia then Australia (the "Domino Theory"). According to the Vietnamese the US depended on mineral imports from Vietnam, such as tin, and the war was a commercial one.

Explaining the history of the Vietnam War is contentious, but here goes. It dates back to the French Empire when Vietnam was part of French IndoChina. After France fell to the Nazis in the Second World War the Japanese took over Vietnam's administration. The Vietnamese resistance to the Japanese was led by fervent (and brutal) Communist Ho Chi Minh, who similarly opposed the French when they returned after the defeat of Hitler. The Americans withdrew their support for the French at a crucial moment, resulting in a humiliating defeat at Dien Bien Phu. The country was then partitioned, with Ho's Communists in the North, and a puppet American government under Diem in the South. In 1963 a Buddhist monk, Thuch Quang Duc, publicly set fire to himself to protest at Diem's corrupt and repressive regime. Unrest and a US-sponsored coup followed, resulting in Diem's assassination. While Ho Chi Minh's police state in the North looked to invade the South, America increasingly sent "advisers" into the country. Ho's insurgents - previously called the Viet Minh - were renamed the "Viet Cong" by CIA psychologists, to make them sound more scary.

The "American War" (as the Vietnamese call it) started in 1964 with the Gulf of Tonkin incident, in which two American destroyers were attacked. It is widely thought that these attacks were exaggerated or even faked by the Americans, who then began to blanket-bomb the North. By December 1965 there were 184,600 US military in the country. At the time of Levertov writing this poem, the American watchwords were "pacification", "search and destroy" and "free-fire zone", and bombing with napalm - burning petrol with a gelling agent which sticks to human skin - was in place, getting a mention in the poem. But the worst horrors of the war were still to come. US conscripts had an average age of 19 and were often ill-educated. As the first step of war is usually to dehumanize the enemy, the Vietnamese were characterized as "gooks", and once this step has been made to withdraw their humanity, anything can be visited on the enemy without conscience. Thus quotes from the military such as, "We're going to bomb them back into the Stone Age" or "We've got to destroy the city in order save it", became commonplace, as did attacks on civilians by troops who could not tell the difference between friend and foe. A number of massacres of civilians occurred in consequence of this mindset, such as the notorious "My Lai" one, and the Americans, who had been anxious to portray themselves as the "good guys", tarnished their reputation. Add to this the long-term genetic effects of the US defoliant Agent Orange - the most horrifying and disturbing legacy of the war - and It must have seemed at more than one point that Levertov was right - that Vietnam and its culture would be obliterated. But she had not reckoned on one thing: that the Americans would be defeated and there would be many more "buds".

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