Poetry books set in wartime occupy a special place of their own, going all the way back to The Iliad. The books I remember are from the last century's wars, Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon and Randall Jarrell and Brian Turner bringing hard-edged visions back to the home front the way in ways no other poets can. In this book, and not all of the poems focus upon death and maiming, but other extreme experiences and the emotions they elicited. This author was a soldier and journalist in Vietnam giving him the chance to describe the harrowing scenes from first-hand experience. The title comes from a derisive Vietnamese term used to refer to the American GIs. Vietnam was a special case because of the military draft and the widespread view that it was being prosecuted for cynical reasons. For the ones who were grinding it out in country day after day, it was an experience that either seared itself into your mind or left you dead on the battlefield.

I'm old enough to remember news footage from Vietnam I saw as a kid. The poems mix enlightenment mixed with shame, with squalor, with what looks like evil. One of the things that made the enemy frightening and disturbing was the way they can be lurking unseen. The deaths and the horrific wounds seen over and over again, through multiple tours of duty, are indelible, and the author does not spare the reader. It is not uncompassionate towards the Vietnamese people. There are the things that you see with your own eyes, that you feel with your other senses, and the widespread propaganda. At the end of the collection, there are few poems depicting the aftermath of the war, the people who return from the front not entirely the same person who left. This is a raw set of poems, full of images some might find triggering, not always easy to read, but important.