Sunday, September 30, 2007
Don't be afraid, open the door
b. Intentional
1. Hello (Mr.) (Mrs.)
Good evening
Good night
2. Don't be afraid. We are friends.
3. We will not harm you. Trust us.
4. We wish to talk with (1) you (2) master of the house (3) father of the family (4) your husband (5) your son (6) your father (7) your mother (8) your older sister or brother (9) your brother-in-law (10) your sister-in-law.
5. Come with me (1) outside (2) to the backyard (3) to the orchard (4) to the garden.
6. Open the door or we will force it.
[the Vietnamese is actually, Open the door, else we destroy the door, Mở cửa, không thì chúng tôi phá cửa.]
7. Move a little further away from the house so that we can talk undisturbed.
8. Have a (1) cigarette (2) candy (3) chocolate.
[from pages 7-9 of a Vietnamese phrase book published in 1962 by the US Army]
Photos from Iraq by US Army paratrooper Tony Erskine, USAF Airman First Class Kurt Gibbons and US Army Sgt. Luis R. Agostini. Tony Erskine explains the first image on his blog, "Kicking in Doors. I wish this was a picture of me, but it's not. It's SSG Amsden, but he didn't budge this metal door. I said, 'Let me give it a shot,' and kicked it right open. I also kicked open the metal door next to it that was pad locked. I love kicking in doors. It's my favorite! Boys never do grow out of that destructive phase."
Posted by Linh Dinh at 6:41 PM
Labels: Iraq, language, Vietnam
2 comments:
Oz said...
Friend,
The pictures you posted here are copyrighted. You are violating that copyright.
I am Tony's father. His brother married a Viet Namese girl and my grandson is half Viet Namese.
Your post denigrates my son's service to this country and I ask you to remove the copyrighted materials immediately.
Thank you.
October 14, 2007 1:30 PM
Oz said...
Also to be found on Ton's Blog...
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” Teddy Roosevelt; CITIZENSHIP IN A REPUBLIC; Speech at the Sorbonne, Paris, France; April 23, 1910
October 15, 2007 5:06 PM
.....
Monday, October 8, 2007
Let's Talk
The shit knowledge gets stuck
In between the eloquent teeth,
Anchors those haloed thoughts.
My chain of minty abstractions trip
Over the titty bumps, get hoovered
Into the scalloped ever pink. Your
Jazzy jibes sidestep that rude rod.
Each utters in euphemisms, the hate
And fuck fuck creases ironed away.
Posted by Linh Dinh at 3:55 PM
Labels: human-made poetry
3 comments:
Oz said...
My dick bleeds
to the tune of morons.
I die and hate
at the same time.
Morons, why do I suffer them?
Why not kill the fools?
Is this poetry?
or arrogance?
Go fuck yourself.
October 14, 2007 7:03 PM
Oz said...
Oh, Hero...
Oh! Fucking hero...
Oh! Gawd, my Vietnamese Hero.
Your poetry is non-existant.
You delude your self...
You think yourself a poet...
but you are only a fool.
Sadly.
Sadly.
Sadly.
You pray to accept the hospitality
of a place not your home..
You accept that hospitality and
insult it in the same moment?
Are you ah hypocrite
or are you a hero?
The poet wants to know...
Eat shit and bark at the moon.
October 14, 2007 7:40 PM
Oz said...
So there you see it...
Any idiot can write this shit and the shit you write is not poetry.
Get over yourself dude.
October 14, 2007 7:42 PM
.............
Tuesday, October 9, 2007
The State Dept.’s Murderous Guardians
By Robert Scheer
Posted on Truthdig, Oct 2, 2007
How did it come to be that the ostensibly best-educated and most refined representatives of the United States in Iraq are guarded by gun-toting mercenaries who kill innocent civilians? More urgently, why did State Department employees and their bosses in Washington tolerate—and pay to conceal—the wanton murder conducted on their watch?
That’s the real scandal of the more than $832 million the U.S. State Department paid Blackwater, investigated this week by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, headed by Henry Waxman (D-Calif.). The issue is not simply that of the Blackwater forces’ horrid behavior but, more important, why the mayhem they unleashed upon innocent Iraqis was approved and covered up by the Bush administration. For example, why did a top State Department official initially suggest a payment of $250,000 of American taxpayers’ money to conceal the uncontested fact that, as the House committee report states, “a drunken Blackwater contractor killed the guard of Iraqi Vice President Adil Abd-al-Mahdi”?
The State Department enabled the Blackwater shooter to be spirited out of the country within 36 hours, and although Blackwater subsequently fired him, he has never faced any criminal charges. Nor have any of the others involved in the 195 shooting incidents Blackwater officials admitted have occurred in the past two years, incidents in which 84 percent of the time Blackwater contractors fired first. According to Blackwater’s own documents, the congressional committee reports, “in the vast majority of incidents ... Blackwater shots are fired from a moving vehicle and Blackwater does not remain on the scene to determine if their shots resulted in casualties.” During one trip U.S. diplomats made to the Ministry of Oil, 18 different Iraqi civilian vehicles were smashed by the fast-moving motorcade. Those hit-and-runs were conducted in full view of the escorted State Department officials without any of them forcing a subsequent investigation.
[...]
Posted by Linh Dinh at 9:33 AM
Labels: Iraq, too late late capitalism, war
1 comments:
Oz said...
Are you an American? Duh, no, you are a Viet Namese. Why did you come to America? If it sucks so badly, why aren't you in Viet Nam?
You know my father died in Viet Nam, yep, that's right. He died there but he did not know it for another twenty years. He died because he had been exposed to Agent Orange.
I talked to a Viet Namese fellow on line shortly after 9/11. We understood each other, expecially when I explained that my father believed in what he was doing.
What do you believe? What do you know? Why are you such an idiot?
October 14, 2007 6:56 PM
Thursday, October 18, 2007
My encounters with Oz
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Hola, It's Io
- An essay by Susan M. Schultz
- Interviewed by Matthew Sharpe
- Interviewed by Phạm Thị Hoài (in Vietnamese)
- Audio file of an interview by Leonard Schwartz
- Audio files on Pennsound
- YouTube videos
- Posts at the Harriet Blog
- Free Love Pix
- Two poems at Green Integer
- Two poems on Mipoesia
- Two prose poems in Jacket
- Poems translated into Arabic by Tahseen al Khateeb
- A short story in Jacket
- Eight Vietnamese poets translated into English
- Seven Contemporary Italian Poets
- A translation of Roberto Castillo Udiarte's "Vita Canis"
Followers
Bouncer, Janus, Bellhop
Choice Verbiage
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
11 comments:
Oz, you are a tool. I am an American and understand your ignorance and denial of what the powers that be exploit and advocate in this country and the world. The rhetoric of Teddy Roosevelt is a language of death, pure and simple, to spill blood for no other "high achievement" than to make hatred and violence.
Hi Lucidcarpet,
Although Oz lost his father to agent orange, he does not point his finger at a military-industrial complex that considers his dad, as well as millions of other victims, collateral damages. As long as they make their cash, everything's fine. Oz also appears unaware of depleted uranium. Instead of cheerleading his son's murderous and suicidal quest, Oz should beg door-kicking Tony to come home NOW.
True, Tony should come home. But how? When he decided to join the armed forces, he knew he might be somewhere foreign, somewhere half around the world, fighting, shooting and being shot at and, yes, kicking down doors. He is a soldier; he gets paid for it. It is his job.
They ought to use Oz’s poetry for the State Department’s Writers on America program, rather than confuse the world with Pinsky and Collins. I especially like ‘Why not kill the fools?’
http://usinfo.state.gov/products/pubs/writers/homepage.htm
Yo Ian,
You're right, Oz should be our poet laureate, instead of that foreigner, Charles Simic. Bobby Fischer was chased out of America for playing chess in Serbia, and now we (I mean you, since I'm not really an American) declare a Serbian our poet laureate?!!!
Yo Joe,
Tony can go AWOL, like his president, or simply get pregnant. After the 28th week, they'll send him home. The rules:
-Pregnancy tests are not required prior to deployment;
-Deployments on Navy ships are permitted up to 20 weeks of pregnancy, provided that medical care is no more than 6 hours away;
-Regulations require that a pregnant sailor notify her commanding officer within two weeks of diagnosis;
-Servicewomen may not be assigned overseas after the 28th week of pregnancy.
Hey, it's Jared Demick again. Iceland seems like it was very cool. If you're still interested in talking about contributing you can still email me at firehairgiraffe@gmail.com
Yo Jared,
I have no new poems. Everything I write is going into this blog. As you can see, I'm also entangled with Mr. Oz. at the moment.
I don't know about a pregnancy option, but I think Tony is stuck in two geographies, Iraq and his own mind. Escape = Change. By the way, how was "rotten shark?"
Rotten shark was fine. For a ketchup container of about 10 small, very pungent pieces, I paid $2.50, ate them with a toothpick. The ammonia cleared my sinus and gave me a lobotomy. Oz should try some.
Linh,
Well, so much for name calling.
I am not going to play pile on with half a dozen of your buddies.
I will take the time to answer everyone since, you have attempted to demonstrate that you are a rational man.
My father had Hairy Cell Leukemia. He died from it in 1993, actually on my brother's birth day.
We sacrificed fifty six thousand Americans in Viet Nam in the hope of preventing the purges Uncle Ho implemented when the American people lost their willingness to finish that war. Had we finished it, the purge would not have happened.
I don't hold the military industrial complex responsible for my father's death because he didn't. Mind you he told me in 1969 after his second tour, "The only way we are going to get all the criminials out of Washington is to shoot them out." Sadly he may have been right.
Never-the-less, his job was recovering downed pilots and helicopters. The VC enjoyed using downed pilots as bait. Defoliants made extractions possible which might never have been possible otherwise. Many men who would have died from a bullet in Viet Nam, lived to die two or three decades later from the chemicals of war.
Linh, it is not a soldier's job to decide whether or not his nation is right in it's decision to go to war. That is the job of poets, philosophers, and clerics. It is a soldier's job to be part of a team, a "Band of Brothers". It is his job to do his job, and that is a lot harder than being in a nice safe house in Pennsylvania. It takes more intelligence than many realize as well.
Moreover, if you really read Tony's blog with an impartial mind you will realize a couple of basic truths. First, soldiers are prohibited from prosthelytizing in Iraq or Iran. It upsets the Imams and makes the soldiers targets. Second, Tony feels called to prosthelytize his brothers, not Iraqis. You need to read what he wrote, before you attribute to him your OWN prejudices. This is not a holy war for anyone, except Islam.
"Door Kicking Tony", uhh, let me know when you have actually read every word Tony has on his blog with an impartial mind.
You have pulled his words out of context, amplified, distorted, and obfuscated them. Antony does not need you to explain himself. He has explained himself quite well on his own web site. If you are the fair minded man you claim to be, you would be urging others to go and read what the man you are judging has written, ALL of IT.
Then after they have read the mans own words, in context, let them decide for themselves.
But that would strip you of power, wouldn't it?
Post a Comment