PAR TIS A N REV lEW
4b5
talk (Casey is obviously
In
love with talk ) beautiful American lan–
guages - in boot camp:
When the Command Sergeant Major
Asks ya somethin
Don't get nervous or scairt
...
Look tall
Whip it to me, Command Sergeant Major
Ah know ma shit
Whip it to me
or caught off limits:
An all these PFs
Around the one scared soul brother
Just tryin to get a piece a pussy mann
Why's everyone so cold mannn
or in other predicaments:
I couldn't tell
But then I grabbed
Down there
It's a woman or was
It's all right
I didn't mind
I had gloves on then
Anecdotes about skivvy girls and practical jokes on captains are equal
here with tales of brutality and betrayal of some Vietnamese (all the
dinks who appear in this book are nominally "allies") , as well as friend–
ship, good working relations and kindness toward other Vietnamese.
Laconic Casey shows no trace of emotion - save perhaps embarrass–
ment, and some sensible advice: "keep hiding from Americans, Sweet–
heart."
The jacket of
Obscenities
says "the poems convey ... a sense of the
horror and futility of war." They don't. Sergeant BooBoo. and Sergeant
JohnJohn are too entertaining. But who needs more of the rhetoric that
blurb implies? The poems convey a sense of raunchy vitality for which
the war is a horrible and futile excuse.
But where Michael Casey was an MP and POW guard - hence
did not have to. endure too many corpses - D. C. Berry, like the Civil
War Whitman who wrote "I am the man, I suffered, I was there," was
a medic.
It
shows. Berry's
saigon cemetery,
compared with
Obscenities,
is less controlled, mo.re groping in language and form. I think it is also
