Poems of War--and Poet Was There

By DIANNE KLIEN

Feb. 17, 1991 12 AM PT

S oldiers

When you look

The horizon

Rocks, sand

Can be anywhere.

Without a face,

A voice

To give you a clue

It could be

Any land

You came to

Die in.

John Harrell is a professional soldier. It is a destiny that haunts him, shadows him, shakes his soul. He is proud.

He is a poet.

“It was very painful to write those poems,” he says. “A lot of those are very private.”

John Harrell looks at his hands, swaddling a cup of coffee, black. There is hesitation in his voice. He looks at me, across a coffee shop’s Formica table, through bifocals. He preferred to meet here. His home, with its mementos, photographs and wallpaper, might broadcast an unauthorized message.

But I had read John Harrell’s poetry first.

Drops

During some season

It rained

Each afternoon.

Hot steaming drops.

When the helicopters came

Drops of blood

Made beautiful mosaics

In the puddles.

Swirling, mixing

No two pools ever the same.

Some dark pomegranate

Some peppermint

Moving, changing.

Each man’s blood blending

With his friends

And foes.

John Harrell spent 23 years in the U.S. Army, active duty reserves. They did him a favor; they let him stay three years beyond the time that the rule book says you’re out.

When he left, in September of 1989, he was a lieutenant colonel. He wants to go back now. The Army, so far, has said no. They’re called hip pocket orders: maybe your time will come, it’s just not right now.

“I feel like I’m not doing enough,” John Harrell says. “You never do enough.”

He is 51 years old.

What a shot.

I read the toe tag again,

“Shot by an AMERICAL sniper,

575 yds.”

Clean through and through,

Amazing.

He couldn’t be more than 12.

Before now, none of John Harrell’s war poems had been published. He wrote them for his family, his friends, because he must. He did send off one poem, about the homeless, to a small literary magazine on the East Coast. They accepted it, then awarded it a small prize. It was published in December of last year.

Lee Mallory, John’s poetry teacher at Rancho Santiago College, told me about this first-time writing student who seemed to come into his own before his eyes. I had called Mallory out of the blue.

“When John did open up,” Mallory says. “It blew me away. It makes me emotional to talk about it. . . . The writing, in his case, became cathartic. The world can only hope to learn from it.”

N V A Woman

They brought you in dying.

Damn, women don’t die fighting.

What were you doing?

Why?

Two .50 caliber hits,

One in the right thigh,

One below the left knee.

Your legs were ribbons of meat.

How can a body tear so.

You had an AK-47 they said

Running, firing.

Why?

I can’t let you die.

Delicate face, small,

Beautiful once.

I took your leg below the knee,

What was left.

I stopped the flow, I bound you,

I cleaned you.

Others did more.

We gave you blood

Life’s blood, our blood

8 pints. I never saw

Someone drink so much.

We tried, we tried so hard.

Then you left, another place

Better care, a hospital.

I felt good, you were alive.

In hours I called,

I had to know

Were you OK, what would happen to you?

“The N V A woman,” they said

“O she died. We had to keep her in

A hallway till the American surgeries were done.”

And now, who will remember you

N V A Woman?

John Harrell was in Vietnam with the medical corps. He felt a duty to go. He is not a doctor, but he learned primitive medicine on the job.

What he saw overloads mere words. Over there, he could not allow himself to feel. It is only now that his poetry of war is spilling out.

“I abhor war,” he says. “I hate it. It is an abomination. It brings out the worst in people.”

Yet Harrell says his poems do not clang anti-war. He did not write them as such. He wrote them, he says, to help people understand what war is. If they should ever earn money, he will donate it to someplace else. He would like them to do good.

“I know what it is like over there,” Harrell says. He is talking about the war in the Persian Gulf.

“They are going to be faced with the same problems that we were. They are professional colleagues. It is OK to abhor war, but to be a professional soldier.”

John Harrell wants so very much to be there. He reminds me that he is very good at his job. A professional soldier, with expertise. But he would rather be remembered, he says, as something else.

“A poet.” The words catch in his throat.

President Bush asked the nation earlier this month to set aside a Sunday to pray. John Harrell offers a prayer of his own.

The Prayer

I pray that as I stand

In this foreign land

I know my enemy

As my brother.

I know that his faith, like mine

Is true to his God,

His family, his home.

That he is there because he too

Trusts in duty.