Dien Cai Dau

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Dien Cai Dau (Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition)

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Written a decade or more after the author's wartime experience, the forty-three poems collected in the volume titled Dien Cai Dau are arranged to follow the trajectory of a single black soldier's experience of the Vietnam conflict from the moment that he suddenly finds himself dropped in the middle of the action to his homecoming and subsequent visit to the war memorial in Washington, D.C.

Komunyakaa's initial military assignment in Vietnam consisted of frontline reporting. In so many ways, his dual roles as eyewitness and journalist prepared him for the eventual task,...

[The entire page is 877 words long]

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