New Haven Independent

The question arose at a moving event at Bru coffee shop on Orange Street.

Bru was filled to overflowing Veterans Day night Wednesday as Lewis Mungo and Van Thompson joined four other vets in a reading to benefit the Homefront.

Homefront is a project of the Columbus House Shelter to build transitional housing specifically for vets. The evening was cosponsored by the Yale School of Public Health. Click here to read an article on that housing effort.

Lewis Mungo (left in photo) handled grenade launchers for the Army in 1965 and 1966 in Vietnam. Van Thompson served in a Marine mortar platoon from 1967 to 1969.

Both men, now in their early 60s, saw the horrors of war. When they returned home they were in the business of forgetting, not remembering. Their preferred methods of forgetting included alcohol and drugs.

Thompson, a native North Carolinian, heard a poetry reading given by his fellow vets in a writing workshop at the VA hospital in West Haven in 2004. Intrigued,he enlisted. Likewise with Mungo, who began writing about coming home from war only in 2002.

The VA hospital’s creative arts therapist Bobbi Blake (pictured with Thompson) said, “It is very difficult to engage Afghanistan-Iraq war vets in treatment. It’s very similar [to the experiences of the poets]. When you’ve been through what these soldiers have gone through, they don’t want to talk about it.”

Let 20 or 30 years pass, and the emotions demand outlet. Art can work better than booze, drugs, or anger. Among the poems that Mungo read in a sonorous voice with Kipling-esque rhythms was “Old Soldier.”

It contained these haunting lines:

You once humped the jungle in raging heat.
Now the family says careful crossing the street.

Thompson’s style was different — few modifiers, just unadorned language, all the more powerful for being unpolished.

In “The Killing Kind,” he brought silence to the crowded house at Bru with these opening lines

Secretly we tell ourselves that we are not the killing kind
truthfully there is not too much we wouldn’t kill to save our own behind.

Then the prose poem concludes: Ain’t life grand?

He meant it without an iota of irony.

“After surviving all of that, life is grand. I feel blessed to be here, to read a poem,” he said.

He added that he never thought he’d live to be 61. “I was so angry when I got home, I’d go into abandoned buildings, get so high to block everything out.”

Mungo suggested that that’s where today’s young war veterans are, closer to abandoned buildings than to the writing workshops that Lisa Siedlarz conducts on a voluntary basis at the VA. (She edited and published an anthology of the vets’ work, called The Season of Now.)

Towards the end of the poignant evening, an audience member had a question: The writing is therapeutic, and the young new vets don’t come forward stateside. Why can’t the writing and art classes be offered on bases near the front in current theaters of war?

Bobbi Blake pondered for a moment. Then she said she’d heard nothing like that going on, beyond a small pilot program teaching yoga to the young soldiers to help them deal with their feelings.

Others veterans reading at Bru Wednesday night included Frank Attruia, Peter Falcione, George E. LaBounty, and Allan Garry. Click here for the Columbus House site where contributions to the Homefront project can be made.