APO 96225, by Larry Rottmann
A young man once went off to war in a far country,
and when he had time, he wrote home and said,
"Dear Mom, sure rains a lot here."
But his mother--reading between the lines as mothers
always do--wrote back,
"We're quite concerned. Tell us what it's really like."
And the young man responded,
"Wow! You ought to see the funny monkeys."
To which the mother replied,
"Don't hold back. How is it there?"
And the young man wrote,
"The sunsets here are spectacular!"
In her next letter, the mother pleaded,
"Son, we want you to tell us everything. Everything!"
So the next time he wrote, the young man said,
"Today I killed a man. Yesterday, I helped drop napalm
on women and children."
And the father wrote right back,
"Please don't write such depressing letters. You're
upsetting your mother."
So, after a while,
the young man wrote,
"Dear Mom, sure rains here a lot."
This poem brings up tons of viewpoints of war, especially the Vietnam War that's specifically referred to in this one. I don't know if it's necessarily irony in the last line…it just makes your heart ache, and your face form a frown, and your eyes divert their attention from the poem to the floor, almost in guilt. The son is trying, from the beginning, to forget about whatever horrible things are going on in the war by focusing on what little beauty remained during that horrific time period in Southeast Asia. In a way, the son and the parents could also be symbolizing the larger, more complicated relationship between the citizens of the United States and the soldiers deployed in Vietnam. The unknowing, blissful ignorance of the American citizens keep prodding into the horrors of Vietnam, but when it comes time to know the truth about the violence, the same citizens become 'depressed' about the truth. The father (which could symbolize the government, or some censoring force) then reprimands the boy for saying such truths, and the substance of the letters goes back to circumventing the real issue.
What does this say about the poet's attitude towards this war? He probably didn't have the most supportive of views on this debacle; from the symbolism provided, he displays the ignorance of the American population and turning a blind eye when the important issues are spoken. The misery of the war is effectively hidden from public view because of this 'father' figure, who refuses to drop in on the son's whereabouts and well-being unless the son poses as a threat to the mother's state of mind. It's a scarily accurate interpretation of the anti-war stance during this time period, or of any war-time period. Even now, I can relate this back to the Iraqi scuffle we had and the present-day struggle with relations in the Middle East. In the back of my mind, I know that this violent war exists in that far-off, exotic world. I know that in American context, we are the good guys and they're the bad guys. But other than that, I don't know the constant and never-ending violence that occurs on both sides of the war simply because it isn't released to the public. Is this because the public itself isn't willing to handle the hard truth, or is it censored from us?
There is sadly no compromise to this battle of information. Like the poem suggests, rejection of the real data consequently leads us to the same useless information regurgitated to us from before. I can't tell if this poem is just part of a cycle of conversations that have happened before, or if this is the first time he brought up the napalm and the killings. The son may have been protecting the mother from these horrors, or he's been forced to keep quiet from his father. Either way, the ugliness of war is definitely apparent, even if indirectly stated, in this poem. The title refers to an apartment number, from what I gather in the footnotes. It is just another example of the catastrophes and heartbreak birthed from wartime.
