Red Wheelbarrow 2008 text FINAL REVISED.indd - De Anza College

other questions weren’t really… It was just really survival-oriented.
Even on the base, you can be a finance clerk or an infantry guy
and get killed by the same mortar. Yeah, so that presence was still there
too. But I don’t know… Maybe I was older too. If I had been 18 or 19
years old, I could have been shattered by this experience much more. But I
was 37. I had only experienced a few losses in my life, nothing major, you
know, but some stuff. I don’t know. I also felt—I was recently divorced,
divorced prior to going there—so I felt sort of free in a sense. I remember
thinking that if I die, I’m 37, almost 38, whereas Lou, a machine gunner
from San Francisco, just turned 18. I am twice his age. I lived twice as long
as this guy. So, this isn’t brave or anything, but I remember thinking if
someone should die, it should probably be me more than him. He hasn’t
even lived, you know.
There was turmoil a lot. I guess that’s the word for that. And also
I wouldn’t extrapolate from me to speak for other soldiers because each of
us is so different. Some of them just became jaded very quickly because
they knew that was a good way to deal with it. Because they could do
whatever the job was, and then, “I’m not going to get emotional, I’m not
going to care.” When you start getting an emotional side involved with
what is happening, it is difficult.
Ruth Rabin: Were you a little bit undercover over there?
BT: How is that? As a poet?
Ruth Rabin: Yes.
BT: Yeah, maybe so. Maybe so. But I didn’t really know there would be
a book here. I didn’t know I would be sitting here today. Except there
were a couple of poems. There was a guy I sent stuff to; we were emailing
back and forth. He was a teacher of mine at one point. He is also an editor
of a magazine, and we were emailing about his daughter and his family
life. And I know he was emailing me that in order to give me a sort of
grounding of what’s going on back home – of real life. Not real life, but
that there is a kind of hope, there’s life back home. He asked me if I had
written any poems. I sent him some poems. And he published them in
this magazine and it is a nationally recognized magazine. I remember
thinking at that moment: I knew he didn’t do it because we were friends
and he wanted to be nice to me. I knew that he did it because he thought
other people would be interested in the poems, and I hadn’t really seen
them in that way before.
In terms of the guys with whom I worked, I was sort of undercover
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