Yusef Komunyakaa Analysis

The Post War Life
The effect of the Vietnam War on the surviving soldiers The Vietnam War left a great scar in all the people that were directly and indirectly involved in it. Among the affected were the soldiers that not only died in the war, but also survived it. The war destroyed them physically and mentally to a point that it felt as if the war continued throughout the remainder of their lives. The feeling of trauma, hatred toward the War, and grief are well portrayed in Yusef Komunyakaa’s Roll Call, and W. D. Ehrhart’s Invasion of Grenada. The authors of these poems strived to provide a first-hand experience with the purpose of proving that even though one survives the war, the same war never leaves.

In Komunyakaa’s Roll Call…show more content…
The author refers to them as crows because a crow has always, especially because of Edgar Allen Poe, been a symbol of melancholy and horror. They sit in a tree that has been burned meaning they are sitting in the debris of what was once a happy life that was destroyed by the war. The imagery the author uses is overwhelming and thus it makes it easy for the reader to empathize with the situation. The occurrence of a funeral is not clear at beginning because the author describes the men “lined up for reveille, ready/ to roll-call each M-16 propped upright/ between a pair of jungle boots,/ a helmet on its barrel” (4-8). At first glance it may seem as if the men were standing right next to their equipment, but when an officer roll calls, he does not roll-call M-16s. Furthermore, when a soldier dies, their main equipment is sometimes brought to the ceremony. The roll-call of names was of the previous owners of the M-16s that died in combat. The funeral becomes evident when the author states: “the perfect row aligned/ with the chaplain’s cross/ while a metallic gray…show more content…
In the poem, a veteran is expressing his opposition towards the war, and criticizing the way the government tries to compensate the war veterans by honoring them with pointless memorabilia that will never make them feel proud of their participation in the war. Instead of creating highways and postage stamps in their name, he only wants to educate the people of a “simple recognition/ of the limits of our nation to inflict our will on others./ What I wanted was an understanding that the world is neither black-and-white/ nor ours”(lines 8-13). He expresses his outrage toward the Western mentality that caused an absurd war that only brought negative repercussions. The world cannot be the way a group of leaders decides it to be because the beauty of this world is that it is diverse and full of different aspects. He accentuates the need for the people to understand that no one is superior to another, and the differences among humans should be accepted and welcomed. He ends by expressing that he wanted an end to monuments, such as the Vietnam Memorial which he calls “a sober/ vast black wall of broken lives”.(2-3). He desperately wants this because the end to monuments means the end to war. If there were no war, there would not be the need to create monuments for veterans, stamps, holidays, or even the “Vietnam Veterans Memorial Highway”(7). If humans learned to accept