Reviewed by Adam Tavel

Despite authoring and editing more than thirty books, and featuring prominently in Ken Burns's acclaimed documentary The Vietnam War, poet W. D. Ehrhart has never received the same degree of literary attention as his contemporaries. Indeed, he seems to have greater visibility among historians and filmmakers than he does among, say, the students and faculty in university creative writing programs. One could mull the reasons for this—a life spent working outside academia, a dedication to small publishers—but ultimately, such considerations are less important than the opportunity readers are now afforded by the publication of Thank You for Your Service: Collected Poems. Here, laid bare, is the sheer moral force of Ehrhart's war poems and the tender richness of his writing about family and nature. The result is a bountiful volume spanning more than fifty years that should earn Ehrhart the wider readership and critical appreciation he deserves.  

Swear-laced and enraged, Ehrhart's titular poem is one of the newest in the collection and serves as a fitting port of entry to his work. "Thank You for Your Service" is a savage mockery of the "superstitious reflex" Americans have made out of that clumsy, if often well-intentioned, phrase. As his bald lines build into a pulsing staccato tirade, Ehrhart forces the reader to confront the disquieting truth that beneath our compulsion to express gratitude to those who served, this new cliché—much like apologias for wars themselves—reduce military conflicts to their best intentions and thus prevent more meaningful, if messy, discourse about the actual demands military service entails. For Vietnam veterans like Ehrhart, who still drag their trauma "like a fucking corpse that won't stay dead," this is a particularly stinging irony, for it seems the nation remains either incapable, or simply unwilling, to reckon with the enormity of that tragic conflict's legacy. Visceral and direct, like much of Ehrhart's oeuvre, the poem is the literary equivalent of being cold-cocked in a bar.

Though it would be reductive to label Ehrhart a mere war poet, Thank You for Your Service makes clear that the enduring horrors of Vietnam proved transformative and remain his most enduring subject. After a few pages of quaint juvenilia, it's striking to encounter Ehrhart's ever-tightening language and newfound attentiveness, as in the brief tercets of "One Night on Guard Duty," where "the shells arc up, / tearing through the air like some invisible hand / crinkling giant sheets of cellophane among the stars." Marked by its fierce declaratives, "A Relative Thing" strains to find meaning in the war's endless suffering, where soldiers "have been Democracy on Zippo raids," becoming "inextricable accomplices / in this travesty of dreams." Relentless in their denunciations, Ehrhart's war poems are most poignant when they also serve as acts of self-interrogation, as in the brief enjambed lines of "Making the Children Behave," offered here in their entirety:

Do they think of me now
in those strange Asian villages
where nothing ever seemed
quite human
but myself
and my few grim friends
moving through them
hunched
in lines? 

When they tell stories to their children
of the evil
that awaits misbehavior
is it me they conjure?

Comprised of two curt sentences and stripped of figurative language, "Making the Children Behave" rightly condemns the sham exceptionalism and cavalier racism that fueled, at least in part, the American invasion of Vietnam. What makes the poem so resonant, however, is the speaker's recognition that the savagery within himself and the orders he's carried out—despite his palpable uncertainty, fear, and guilt—will haunt future generations in ways beyond measure. Ehrhart's astute use of anaphora and rhetorical questions are on full display in "Beautiful Wreckage," one of his most masterful poetic achievements, which inventories a series of heartbreaking casualties, only to end with a closing stanza that lingers like an unresolved minor chord: "What if none of it happened the way I said? / Would it all be a lie? / Would the wreckage be suddenly beautiful? / Would the dead rise up and walk?"

Elsewhere, particularly in his later work, Ehrhart reflects on domestic scenes and meditative pastorals, displaying a heightened lyrical sensibility that offers a welcome counterpoint to his war writing. In lush quatrains, "Red-tailed Hawks" details the shy wonder of young children on a school field trip as they "fill the woods" and stare at the circling birds above as they fade to "four black dots / of elemental joy against white clouds." In "Variations on Squam Lake," a rare foray into formalism, Ehrhart's sonorous, painterly diction enacts a vignette worthy of Monet, where "the lake [is] so still, the stars fall in." Part elegy, part confessional monologue, "Visiting My Parents' Graves" grieves the attendant losses of middle age and the layered naiveties of small-town life. "The Amish Boys on Sunday," a recent inclusion, offers understated reverence –despite Ehrhart's pronounced religious skepticism notable in other poems—for three cheery church-bound lads who have yet to fully comprehend the tension between their culture and the wider world. It would be inaccurate to say Ehrhart became a different poet in the 1990s, but his work since then displays a greater thematic and tonal range. He is never done with Vietnam, but in midcareer, Ehrhart consciously turns away from it, and the result is an ever-widening poetic gaze.

In her exquisite introduction to the collection, Lorrie Goldensohn catalogs Ehrhart's rare gifts. Not only does Ehrhart unify the personal, political, and historical in his poems, but his best work enacts the courage to insist "on re-drawing the moral responsibility for death and injury back on the soldier himself, as well as up and down the chain of command, on all sides of the conflict." Staunchly moral and doggedly idealistic, Ehrhart's poems tally the cascading spiritual traumas of combat with terseness, precision, and vulnerability, and in the process, indict all of us who are complicit in the machinery of war, from the individual soldier to the passive voter to the highest official. Though he allows himself and his reader fleeting moments of transcendence, Ehrhart's Vietnam poems, taken as a whole, make a compelling argument against comfort, against apology, and against redemption. Seen in this light, Ehrhart's bleak beseechings have more in common with the poetry of Thomas Hardy and Stephen Crane than that of other Vietnam-era poets such as Yusef Komunyakaa and Bruce Weigl. Their lessons for our never-ending conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq are as prescient as they are chilling. Thank You for Your Service endures as a testament to truth-telling, the act of witness, and one ragged heart staying open after war, and for this, readers everywhere should be grateful.