Bruce Berger, the author, finally came home 50 years after the Vietnam war when his memories crystallized into the 34 poems in this chapbook. He shipped to Vietnam as an Infantryman in 1970 but was assigned most of the year to the Casualty Branch of the 101st Airborne Division at Camp Eagle, near Phu Bai. As “next-of-kin” editor, he wrote hundreds of sympathy letters to grieving families back home for loss of their soldier, and sometimes helped gather fallen brothers on battle grounds to begin their long journeys home.
Through this lens, his poems evoke an overwhelming sense of loss on many fronts: the brave American soldiers who gave their lives in the long war; a village of South Vietnamese widows; the thousands of bui doi, innocent but reviled half-breed (Amerasian) children; the empty afterness of battle grounds and burials; the long, deadly reach of Agent Orange and PTSD into veterans’ lives still today; and the thunderous silence of missing parades back home. Writing these poems brought him home.
Many of the poems are illustrated with artwork created by members of the Providence Art Club in Rhode Island. All earnings from this book will be donated to the Vietnam Veterans of America.
Book Review 1:
"This is war as never seen before; raw feelings of senseless loss as never recorded before; a glimpse into the heart of a compassionate soldier, amidst the brutality of Vietnam, as never expressed before. Emotion jumps from its pages and sticks. A mosaic of war’s stark realities, then and now, stays with you long after the words sink in. You may put the book down, but you cannot escape its message. Regardless of who you are, this book will move you. For the veteran, expect a return to the killing fields in snatches of memories and rumblings of long-suppressed fear, anger, guilt and loss. For families of those lost during the war comes an understanding your grief does not go unnoticed and your eternal emptiness is understood and respected. And, for the uninitiated, who think of war in terms of a brief sound bite on the evening news—this is a hard life lesson: A single gunshot in a nameless piece of jungle can claim a life in a second and change countless other lives, half-way around the world, forever. Lastly, this is a courageous, deeply personal, discussion of inner battles many of us face. To many veterans, living with the war for decades after returning is so hard and so easily misunderstood. This book takes a giant step towards that understanding and awareness. All veterans will be better because of it.” -- Rick St. John, author of the acclaimed Circle of Helmets and Tiger Bravo’s War, and a retired U.S. Army Colonel who led a company of 101st Airborne Division paratroopers in heavy fighting in Vietnam.
Book Review 2:
“Fires in some men, like fires deep in forest roots, can burn for decades. Fragments paints such a fire in the metaphor of a journey for those who flew home but not home after a long, bloody, bitter war in Vietnam that often did not end with a warrior’s return to American soil. Berger’s pieces are like fragmentary grenades and flashbangs, images and lines that catch in your throat, stop your breath, blind you with tears. Like the image of a gravedigger back home whose ‘heart leaks into the grave’ he digs for his brother … Or the poem ‘66 Miles,’ the distance you get when you place 58,220 dead head-to-toe, head-to-toe, ‘the length of a trip from Nogales to Tucson, or Trenton to the Big Apple.’ Think about that … and then they came home to no parades, only pockets of seething scorn. Years later they hear the meaningless koan, ‘Thank you for your service.’ Welcome home, my friend, welcome home.” -- Joseph Heywood, author of more than 20 books and perhaps best known for the Woods Cop Mystery Series. He served five years in the Air Force as a navigator, spending 15 months in the Vietnam theater
Book Review 3:
"This is an important book. In a collection of poems he calls ‘fragments,’ Bruce K. Berger gives us an incisively moving—often heartbreaking—record of the Vietnam war, which left permanent scars on the minds and bodies of those who served and suffered there, then endured what Berger calls ‘the long coming home.’ The poems are vivid, unsentimental, sharply evocative of the places and the people—combatants and noncombatants on both sides, victims of the war’s horrors both in country and back home. This is an important book. You need to read it. Insistent, unforgettable, its poems will frag your heart.” -- Arnold Johnston, author of Where We’re Going, Where We’ve Been and The Witching Voice: A Novel from the Life of Robert Burns.
