For the American soldier fighting to survive in an alien jungle, even the familiar could be turned on its head. In “Hanoi Hannah,” even Ray Charles’s voice echoing in the darkness becomes a tool of propaganda for the Vietcong, reminding the soldier that nothing exists in isolation. Even in remote Southeast Asia, the realities of American racial and cultural history intervene. When the death of Martin Luther King, Jr., is also used as a propaganda weapon, it is directly linked for the black soldier with the deaths of comrades in arms.

Komunyakaa portrays the absurd sense of chaos in a world that nothing can be pinned to, a world where those in control remake the rules daily for their own good, where even the leaders are adrift in currents they cannot understand, where the results of actions can only be seen in retrospect. In “Re-creating the Scene,” when a Vietnamese woman is raped by three soldiers, “she floats on their rage/ like a torn water flower,/ defining night inside a machine/ where men are gods.” When authorities intervene, the woman is killed, the story is confused by counterstories, and nothing is settled; as for the baby that survives, its future is as uncertain as the men, the country, and the war itself.

When chaos dispenses with civilized “rules,” when fear overwhelms love, present desires take precedence over long-term goals. In “One More Loss to Count,” an American soldier and a Vietnamese woman, each with lovers elsewhere, slide into the arms of the moment. Even as he acts, the soldier recognizes that a line has been crossed and that there is no pretending that anything of worth can be preserved. Vietnam itself, the poems suggest, has crossed the line, both for soldiers and for those left at home, and thus has tainted the delicate balance of “civilized” morality for some time to come.

Even when the soldiers are “safe” at home they struggle to digest the past and understand what was lost and gained. Haunted by ghosts, the soldier knows, in “Missing in Action,” that “we can’t make one man/ walk the earth again.” Something irretrievable has been lost, Komunyakaa suggests, and the men, the culture, and the earth itself must remake themselves in new forms.

Classifications of race, nationality, and gender are also changed when normal contexts are destroyed. In “Tu Do Street,” the familiar segregated worlds the black soldier knew in America lose their boundaries as black and white soldiers sleep with the same women—whose brothers fight them in the bush. All of them are more interconnected than any can realize: “these rooms/ run into each other like tunnels/ leading to the underworld.” Above all, they are connected by a heightened knowledge of death. In “Donut Dollies,” when battle-weary soldiers with “the names of dead men/ caught in their throats” fail to notice the perky “dollies” who greet them, both the numb infantrymen and the women must learn new roles.

Those experiencing the extremes are linked to those who have shared similar moments, all holders of “insider knowledge.” Komunyakaa seeks understanding, even kinship, with those he fought against. “Prisoners” describes his fascination with Vietcong prisoners of war who fail to crack under interrogation: “I remember how one day/ I almost bowed to such figures.” In “Sappers,” a soldier marvels at the enemy’s determination, even as they push forward to kill him: “Opium, horse, nothing/ sends anybody through concertina/ this way.” As the Vietcong “try to fling themselves/ into our arms,” he marvels at the intimacy he feels for those who share similar visions of death, passion,...