on the potawatomi trail: larry mitchell’s survivor tales
"This land of jungles and paddy fields
is where Heaven meets Earth."
— Larry Mitchell, "The Ballad of Vietnam"
I have just finished reading a book about war and survival. Very few poets have written about war first hand. That is not to say there are not a lot of war-themed poems in the world. When George Gordon Noel, known to the world as Lord Byron, went on his first European tour he kept a poetic diary of everything he came upon as he went along. He saw first hand the Peninsular War (1808 — 1814) as Napoleon Bonaparte attempted to invade Spain and Byron wrote about it at a time when no one else was doing such things. When he returned home he translated his diaries into poetry and published them as the first of four cantos called Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. The poems immediately became a huge success which lead Byron to note, "I woke one day to find myself famous."
The bulk of poetry that deals with war tends to be anti-war poetry, usually written by those who have never experienced it, living on the other side of the planet from where it is happening. Much of the poetry written by members of groups like Poets Against War and Poetry Without Borders: poets of witness falls into this category. There is nothing good or bad about that; it just is. Poets like Brian Turner in Here, Bullet (2005) and Yusef Komunyakaa's Dien Cai Dau (1988) are the notable exceptions, recording their first hand war experiences. Now we should add Larry Mitchell to that select list.
I have just finished reading Mitchell's Potawatomi Tracks (The Ballad of Vietnam and Other Stories) from heliographica press (2004). Larry Mitchell is a Potawatomi from the Prairie Band reservation in Kansas and lived through the fire fight that lasted for days on the notorious Hill 805 before it was overrun by the enemy. His "The Ballad of Vietnam," a free verse poem, starts this way:
Firebase Ripcord sits on the ridge of a nearby mountain.
A desolate firebase;
one that looks like the brown hump of a buffalo … (1)
Larry Mitchell is an excellent story teller. The poem takes us from that hill back into time to record Mitchell's experiences that lead him up to find himself "an infantryman that served in this rifle company/ on Hill 805./ Under a livid grey sky,/ it took me half a July morning to dig a fox-hole" (3). The sign of a good poet is writing a poem that makes you want to re-read it again and again, that makes you want to go up to strangers and say, "you need to read this!" "The Ballad of Vietnam" is such a poem and Larry Mitchell is such a poet.
Perhaps one of the hardest parts of telling a story is the ending, especially when there is no clear stopping point. Survivor's guilt, substance abuse, fear all blur the lines between "the end" and the life the writer is living now. So it is to Mitchell's credit that he ends his poem the way he does, setting us up for the other themes of his book — Mitchell's Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, his hellish decent into drugs and alcohol, the endless racism and abuse he suffered as being both a Vietnam Veteran and a Native American. But Potawatomi Tracks is a collection of poems about survival most of all. In the Introduction the author Joni Bour writes, "This isn't an easy book to read. It is painfully easy to follow, but it isn't easy to look at" (i). And yet looking hard and long at our collective actions is exactly what we need to do. Potawatomi Tracks is a book that needs to be read by everyone who has been affected by war, regardless of their political presumptions.
As long as we keep sending soldiers out into the world to fight and die and suffer on our behalf we need poets and story tellers like Larry Mitchell to tell us the hard stories about what our actions are doing in the world. That is the other job of a good poet. "The Ballad of Vietnam" is such a poem and Larry Mitchell is such a poet.