This month is the 50^th anniversary of the occupation of Phnom Penh by the brutal Khmer Rouge fighters in Cambodia. I was a junior at the University of Lowell in Massachusetts reading newspaper articles and watching TV reports as what we called the Vietnam War expanded in the region. None of us in the Lowell area could imagine what the tragedy in Cambodia would lead to in a struggling old textile mill city in New England, which now has the second largest Cambodian American population in the U.S.

     While I was a political science major in my studies, I had begun writing letters to the local newspaper about current events, as well as short stories, essays, and poems for a couple of years, trying to find the right form for what I wanted to say. The poem that follows is a beginner’s effort but I’m posting it here for the record and to show how external events were affecting my early efforts to get words down on paper. It was paper in those days before laptops and phones. We had pencils, ballpoint pens, and manual typewriters.

     This poem appeared in the student newspaper on campus around the time that normal life was blowing up in Cambodia. It was my attempt to add my voice of concern. Fifty years later, I am fortunate to have many Cambodian American friends who have made good lives for themselves in the Lowell area. — PM

“I Read the News Today”

By Paul Marion

Phnom Penh is bleeding from the rockets landing in the square.
A pedicab driver slumps over a red wheel. Next door,
In South Vietnam, mothers are holding dead daughters
In tired worn hands, in old sad arms.
With old sad arms peasants pack some things,
Leave their land to walk to the Saigon fort,
And all along the highway they mourn, mourn and cry,
Scream and die, every eye insanely glazed.

A bronzed-faced Cambodian boy wears a plum scarf
And green fatigues, shoulders an M-16 as tall as him.
An Asian elder sports brass medals and a steel helmet—
He’s sick of seeing soldiers in the rice paddies.
On the road bicycles pedal way from battle one thousand.

Now someone’s flying in food, and someone’s asking for more bullets.
Someone’s warning we might hear a click around the world,
The click of an empty rifle that’ll set dominoes in motion:
Dominoes down, 1, 2, 3, dominoes in motion,
First the South China Sea, then the Pacific Ocean.
They say, Send the ammunition or say an act of contrition,
They say, Lookit, there goes Quang Tri, there goes Hue,
Tomorrow, it’ll be Cam Ranh Bay.
Can you forget Khe Sahn and those red rocket bombs?
Want that in Saigon? Send the ammo, boys, c’mon, they say.
And another voice says, You’re crazy with that war.
You don’t understand. Napalm scorched that land.
Nobody’s singing the old song today:
“Nothin’ could be finer
Than to be in Indochina
In the mornin’.”

They’re bringing in crack paratroops
To stop attempted coups on General Thieu,
And Lon Nol wishes he could hide in a hole.
Helicopters defend refugees from sniper Victor Charlie.
Cold steel guns from Moscow and China hold no special glory.
From Washington to Shanghai, when guns speak, people die.

Broken teeth and broken bones, bamboo hats and burnt-out homes,
Hey, United States, hold the phone —
Remember how it started? Remember 55,000 U.S. lives,
Not counting ARVN’s, VC, NVA, farmers, children,
Not counting broken hearts, wooden limbs,
Or the half-and-half babies in Phuoc Binh?

Is your conscience playing tricks on you? Is it a people’s revolution?
A brush-fire war where bomb-and-gun solutions won’t work anymore?
The gale of suffering blows from the North, blows down the Ho Chi Trail,
Blows across from the east, blows in on a B-52’s tail.
We stuck our feet in the mud this time,
We’ve got the walkin’, talkin’ DMZ Blues.
This is one patriotic trip that just won’t rhyme.
Hey, did you read the news?

1975