Funny enough, the title of the poem is the mailing address "APO96225". I"m probably the only one who thinks the title of my blog entry is humorous. Atleast I can laugh at myself.
Anyway, getting back on track, this poem reminds me a lot of The Things They Carried! The ignorance of society amazes me; not to mention, how selfish everyone can be. We ask for the truth, and the shun those who actually listen to our demands. Yes, I know, nobody wants to hear about torture, death, murder, and bombings, but if we cannot handle the truth we should not ask in the first place! Maybe it seems like the curteous thing to do, to show interest in our loved one's lives, but I am sure that the soldiers do not want to have to explain all of the terrible things they see to their family members, anyway.
The entire poem is an understatement. Even in the line where the speaker tells his mother that [he] killed a man and...dropped a napalm on women and children," he is understating what actually happened. He provided no detail as to why, when, how, and with who, he just left it at that. The poem also refelcts situational irony because the response the speaker gives is different from the expected response, and the same can be said for his mother. In addition to the speaker's parents' reaction, the rest of the world during Vietnam was responding the same way. Nobody acknowledged the soldiers, and nobody celebrated when they returned home. Everyone put Vietnam to the side, and pretended like the "war" did not exist.
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