Why Newfoundland poet Randall Maggs plans to finish his next book far, far from home GlobeArts
This morning I was thinking of the iconic picture of the late U.S. senator John McCain in Truc Bach Lake in Hanoi, after he was shot down when he was a pilot during the Vietnam War. He’s in the water, with half a dozen or more people swimming out toward him. I’m fixated on that photograph. How did he end up there?
At the time, I had a very close friend who was in Vietnam. He got there in the middle of the Tet Offensive in 1968. Five years ago, I came across all his letters to me from that time. I don’t know why I kept them, but I did. He was stationed in I Corps in Phu Bai. All my letters to him were burnt up in the fires of Vietnam. But I can tell by his letters to me what questions I had been asking him and what we were talking about.
I’m probably on my 75th draft of the McCain poem. I think I started it three or four years ago, but I had put it aside. I think I struggled with it because I hadn’t really understood what I was trying to get at. McCain, as I did, followed his father into the military. At some point it hit me, the whole notion of him struggling to get out of his harness – it was what he was trying to do his whole life.
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