Ex-Officer Pulls Poetry Out of War : John C. Harrell of Anaheim, who worked in medical company, will read some of his works on Veterans Day.

The rhythmic whop whop whop of the Medivac helicopters would announce their arrival.

Flown in from the field to the medical company at Hawk Hill, an AMERICAL Division base in South Vietnam, the infantry casualties would be rushed into the underground treatment area where they would be prioritized according to the severity of their injuries and their survivability:

They would arrive with head wounds. Chest wounds. Burns.

And, all too frequently, multiple amputations, their limbs blown to kingdom come by land mines and booby traps.

“Actually, if a guy had a clean gunshot wound he was lucky,” recalls John C. Harrell of Anaheim.

Harrell was the 29-year-old executive officer of the medical company, which served as a pit stop for casualties on their way to a large hospital 40 minutes away. The small company had only two doctors and 20 medics on duty, and when casualties were heavy even the desk-bound Harrell was pressed into service.

“I remember one night we lost a whole battalion,” says Harrell, who learned to treat casualties for shock, to stop the bleeding, clean wounds and remove shrapnel. “All we did is try to get them stable so they’d last long enough to get to the hospital.”

Two decades have passed since Harrell’s yearlong tour of duty, Vietnam class of 1969-70.

But Harrell, who retired from the Army a lieutenant colonel in 1989 after 23 years, hasn’t forgotten what he saw and the people he knew in Vietnam. And he doesn’t want others to forget.

On Veterans Day, Wednesday, Lighting Publications, a fledgling Fullerton-based publishing house, will release Harrell’s first collection of war poetry, “Twenty Years” ($12.95 paperback; $22.95 hardback), with illustrations by Vietnam veteran P.L. (Moki) Martin, a San Diego artist who spent 23 years as a Naval SEAL officer.

To celebrate the book’s debut, Harrell will read from his work and sign copies of the first edition at 8 p.m. Wednesday at Alta Coffee House, 506 31st St., Newport Beach.

Reading his war poems in public is not something the quiet, soft-spoken veteran looks forward to. He is, Harrell says, a man who would prefer to write than to talk. Besides, he says, “I don’t relish making people sad.”

Harrell, 52, didn’t start writing about Vietnam until 1990. He has tapped memories that, as he writes in the prologue, have simmered “like a witch’s caldron. . . . Sometimes boiling, burning my soul/Destroying my family, my friends/ My mind. At other times, just there/Just below the surface./ Only a scratch away, a look . . . “

As Newport Beach poet and creative writing teacher Lee Mallory says in the book’s foreword: “The majority of these poems boil up in a fiery swirl of pain from 20 years past.”

The collection is divided into four sections: “The Vietnam War,” “The Gulf War,” “The Other Wars” and “After the Wars.” Unlike other poems that describe the horrors of the Vietnam War from the grunt’s point of view, much of Harrell’s unembroidered free verse describes the work of those, like himself, who fought to save lives.

In a poem titled “Nine-Thirty,” Harrell describes a soldier who was brought in with a small wound:

A severed artery in your leg.

Simple, easy to save.

Yet you knew before us,

We wouldn’t believe.

What else was severed at nine-thirty?

You watched us work in silence.

Your eyes followed us. Why wouldn’t

You speak?

At nine-forty you died.

Not of the wound we saw,

Something else.

Why wouldn’t you help us?

It wasn’t only American lives they attempted to save. One of Harrell’s best poems deals with a dying female North Vietnamese Army soldier who had been hit by a .50-caliber machine gun round, her legs “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 . . . .”

The poem ends with the woman dying, having waited in a hospital hallway “ ‘till the American surgeries were done. . . . And now, who will remember you/NVA Woman?”

Other poems deal with dopers, fragging, an over-the-hill supply sergeant who continues to do his job, and Harrell simply sitting at night in a base camp with his buddies:

. . . Watching the artillery fires.

The lumination rounds, tracers

Like bo n y fingers reaching out,

Searching, finding some unknown heart. . . .

All night long, at random times, at random places they would fire.

We would drink and laugh,

Drink and laugh,

Drink.

Harrell has been writing poetry since he was majoring in philosophy at San Jose State College in the early ‘60s. He’d write short poems on the backs of napkins and coasters in bars and then give them to friends--everything from love poems to cowboy poetry to haiku. “I love to write,” he says.

Except for long letters home, however, he never wrote while he was in Vietnam.

But after retiring, he says, he was at a loss for what to do with his life, and an Army nurse who had served with him on military exercises in Ecuador and Honduras suggested, “Why don’t you write?”

Harrell says it wasn’t difficult tapping his Vietnam memories. “Usually I didn’t tap them; they tapped me.”

Most of his poetry is short. In fact, only one of the poems in his collection is more than a page long. “I guess I grew up with a haiku mentality; the shorter the better,” says Harrell, who writes on small white note pads and rarely revises a poem once he has written it down.

About six months after he began writing, Harrell signed up for Lee Mallory’s writing class at Rancho Santiago College. (“I wanted to find out if what I was doing is considered poetry,” he says.)

Mallory, who edited the collection, recalls the first night Harrell read some of his poems in class.

“He sat there sullen and quiet for seven weeks and everyone was reading their little ditties,” Mallory said. “One night he said, ‘I have some poems I’m ready to share.’ And it just came forward in a rush. It was like the class was caught in a fast riptide. There was wonder on the faces of the students, there was sadness and shock. He’s such a quiet man, but the room caught fire. That’s what strong poetry does. It grips you; it puts you there.”

Harrell says he originally had no intention of publishing his war poems; he simply wanted to share them with his friends.

“I wrote the poems because I want people to remember these veterans and those times and because they’re important,” he says. “There are people in those poems I don’t want forgotten.”

The second thing, he says, “is to let (readers) see and understand how some professional soldiers like me view their profession and how they look at their job of serving their country.”

“And the last thing I wanted to do--and maybe the most important thing--is I wanted to tell the younger professional soldiers what it may be like if they get into a war and (let them know) that it is OK to do their jobs and serve their country. They’re going to face war’s horrors firsthand but need to know they’re not alone and it’s OK to feel the way they do sometimes.”

Indeed, if there is an overriding theme to his collection, Harrell says, “it’s that you can do your job as a professional soldier and it’s OK. I am a professional soldier. I don’t like war. I hate it. It’s the last instrument we should ever use, but when everything else fails and you do have a war, (soldiers) have to go fight it.”