A Quiet Voice : Poet’s ‘Distilled Outrage’ Fills Pages of First Book on Vietnam

At times when I am calm

I remember

that even if you waited for it

nothing came as suddenly

as gunfire

and nothing (not even the Lieutenant)

seemed as stupid

as the silence that followed--

At such times I know also

that each of us

who fought in Vietnam

was spiritually captured by it

and that each remains

a prisoner

of his own war . . .

--from “Johnny’s Song: Poetry of a Vietnam Veteran” by Steve Mason

Steve Mason’s most lasting memory of Vietnam is one that comes to the mind suddenly, in a flash, bringing a tear to a manly eye, even in a dark corner of a restaurant where croissants and imported coffees mix more easily than savage flashbacks from a war he’ll never forget.

He starts telling the story, hesitating to divert his eye from the sunlight streaming in the window. He is years away at this moment, lost in anger and regret and a dream, “the bad of which” he can’t undo.

“She was a girl, 7, maybe 8 years old,” he said. “I was holding her in my left arm, feeding her from a rice bowl. The more I put in her mouth, the more it just fell out. The rice was all over my jungle boot. Its spilling out was only worsened by a hideously cleft palate--the only thing marring her beauty.

“I didn’t know how to adjust my feeding her the rice with the speed of her lapping it up. She started crying, tears running down her face. She was crying for her father. She didn’t know where he was. We were walking, walking . . . . Suddenly, she sees the legs of a man jutting out from the hut up ahead. She knows the legs as those of her father. I had killed him only moments before . . . “

Such moments are everlasting parts of Mason’s memory--cornerstones of a conscience. At 46, he has found a way--he thinks--to deal with the horror of such moments, to build a present from the carnage of a past.

On this recent afternoon, the House of Representatives is voting on whether to grant aid to the Nicaraguan contras , whom President Reagan has advertised as “freedom fighters.” Mason turns the phrase over and over, spitting it out as one would poison with the taste of bile.

“Freedom fighters,” he said, shaking his head. “I didn’t know what to give that girl,” he said, suddenly back in the jungles of Vietnam. “War doesn’t come with directions on the bottle. I gave her the only thing I knew to give--life in the form of food. The fact that I had taken her father--well, I didn’t have the heart to blow my brains out at that moment, like I wanted to. And now we’re talking about $100 million so the sons of poor men can do the same to other girls’ fathers. Jesus . . . “

Mason is fighting a new fight, with what he considers a rare kind of weapon, a rare kind of freedom--poetry. He longs to emerge as nothing less than “the articulate voice of conscience” for “a betrayed generation”--the one “sacrificed in the lesson of Vietnam, the ultimate lesson for America.”

The spellbinding result is “Johnny’s Song: Poetry of a Vietnam Veteran,” first in a trilogy called “The Warrior Poet.” “Johnny’s Song” is published by Bantam Books, in a lavish format and with the kind of front money that would leave most authors--especially first-timers--dancing in the streets.

Fortune hardly means, however, that Mason is a “happy” man. He isn’t much sure what happiness means. Happiness is hardly living in Rancho Bernardo, a fact he gently laughs about, or having a business executive wife and four children, ranging in age from 1 to 25, or looking at the future through the eyes of a jaded veteran.

“I was somehow born miserable,” he said, returning to that looking post somewhere beyond the sunlight. “Happiness is a concept in nature only. I’m not one to wake up in the morning and with all my parts working exclaim, ‘Oh, what a happy . . . day!’ ”

Neither is he the kind of poet to invoke what all the cliches suggest--that by sitting down and penning prose to paper, he can somehow exorcise the demons of a dirty little war. Exorcism--the cleansing of a soldier’s conscience--was not precisely what he felt in reaching the finish line of “Johnny’s Song.”

“Relief was probably the first thing I felt,” he said. “Relief and validation--it was nothing close to joy. Nor was it close to personal pleasure. I hope it’s merely a slice of humanity, a little food sharing, my way, somehow, of making a small contribution.”

In some ways Mason stands as a throwback to another time. If the book really takes off, he isn’t much sure he’s ready for the whims of 1980s marketing--namely, interviewers from “Good Morning America” to the San Diego Reader wanting to know the banal necessities of a private life.

He zealously guards his cherished privacy, saying it isn’t so much a dank dark secret but that it “gets in the way” of trying to tell the truth of an awful war. In other words, it’s irrelevant, shallowly without place in the framework of war and peace. When the children’s book he’s working on--”The Tales of Grandpa Harry”--is finished, “Well, then,” he said, “then you can ask me about my wife, my kids and what I gulped for breakfast.”

But even then, you sense, Mason won’t be willing to indulge the curious with snapshots from a private life. He thinks the culture already gorges itself with too much mishmash in the first place.

On the same day that Congress considered its historic contras vote, the banner story in USA Today was the item that Chrysler chairman Lee Iacocca may do a guest shot on NBC’s “Miami Vice.”

“That is pathetic ,” Mason said with a vengeance. He railed about the apathy and none-too-benign detachment of Americans to “just about anything” happening in the larger world. Or a world other than that on the television screen.

“They call it the ‘Third World,’ ” he said. “Jesus, how many worlds are there? If we continually enforce that distance, how can we possibly achieve peace in our time or anyone else’s?”

Why poetry, Mason often is asked. “Because I wanted to explain my war in terms I could understand,” he said.

His poetry is much like his conversation--pearly rivers of stream-of-consciousness that often leaves listeners (and readers) thinking that maybe they, too, have been to Vietnam. That they, too, had listened to the music, taken the drugs, felt the gunfire and seen the carnage “up close and personal.”

The greatest compliment a reader can pay him, Mason said, is to say, “I too was in ‘Nam and want you to know you wrote that book for me.” And yet Mason finds himself occasionally at odds with veterans who haven’t embraced the nothing-but-peace position he finds unalterable. Still, he calls such men “brothers” and says society has to give that person his enemy, his dignity, his remembrance of a war.

It is for that person too, he said, that he has written the book and will draft two others as well. Regardless of belief, regardless of post-war transformation, his is poetry for “a single generation,” the one that stood in the eye of a hurricane that wiped away belief systems, values, reliance on education, the church, family, love . . .

“My poetry is distilled outrage,” he said, “stored up over 20 years as an American fighting man. My concern is that humanity become greater than any man’s patriotism. I have demonstrated I will die for my country--now I will live for my world. I have become a warrior for peace.”

Even after Vietnam, Mason finds the need great, the lessons still unlearned. He’s alarmed that the country continues to “link arms philosophically with men who have been abhorrent human beings--Marcos, Duvalier, the Shah . . . Somebody in this country is always willing to psych an entire nation to commit to war or back a chump elsewhere.”

And one of the worst sins of humanity, he attests, is to banish the lessons of the past and repeat the same cruel jokes on one’s self “over and over, again and again.”

A world borne of detachment and apathy and too many references to “other” worlds is, Mason said, one that “pays great attention to style and so little to substance. If you’re gonna function with a minimum of substance, you had better have some damn sweet sauce.”

Despite the horror that it plays in his consciousness, Mason, like dozens of vets he knows, longs to return to Vietnam--not to renew a war, of course, but to find (or hope to find) whatever it was he left behind.

What does he expect to find? What does he hope to find?

“Maybe,” he said, with tear-stained eye, “the thread of me.”