[In the following positive review, Cramer examines Komunyakaa's depiction of the Vietnam War in Dien cai dau.]

Dien Cai Dau (the title, meaning "crazy," is Vietnamese slang for "American soldier") strives for total immersion in the visceral horrors of America's most unpopular war, the book's forty-four poems assembled without the intervention of section dividers or the mediation of an epigraph. It's as if Komunyakaa wanted nothing to palliate the blinding immediacy of combat.

Komunyakaa served in Vietnam as a correspondent, and as a number of his titles signal—"Camouflaging the Chimera," "Somewhere Near Phu Bai," "Starlight Scope Myopia," "We Never Know"—he seeks to depict the sheer confusion of war, the infantryman's chronic sense of dislocation. Sometimes the soldier's survival depends upon this absence of distinct outlines: "when will we learn / to move like trees move?" asks a GI who has unwittingly crossed paths with the Viet Cong; elsewhere the image of camouflage epitomizes how quickly the landscape can swallow its infiltrators, who "move like a platoon of silhouettes / balancing sledge hammers on our heads, / unaware our shadows have united / from us, wandered off / & gotten lost."

To convey the ordinary soldier's edgy watchfulness—the helpless awareness that mortal threat looms on the periphery—Komunyakaa deploys his present-tense, declarative sentences over a gridwork of enjambed free verse, coupling syntactical nervousness with a method of detailing that suggests the darting glance of a jittery sentry:

       The moon cuts through
       night trees like a circular saw
       white hot. In the guard shack
       I lean on the sandbags,
       taking aim at whatever.
       Hundreds of blue-steel stars
       cut a path, fanning out
       silver for a second. If anyone's
       there, don't blame me.
                        ["Somewhere Near Phu Bai"]

If visual murkiness is Komunyakaa's metonym for the blurred moral outlines of all wars, Dien Cai Dau is also charged with the Vietnam veteran's peculiarly anguished knowledge of this war's moral ambiguities. In naming his book after a Vietnamese phrase for the American occupier, Komunyakaa articulates a deeply divided allegiance, his ambivalence reinforced by his status as a black GI, who experiences recurrent inklings of solidarity with his nonwhite antagonists: "VC didn't kill / Dr. Martin Luther King," claims one propaganda leaflet Komunyakaa encounters. In "Starlight Scope Myopia," Viet Cong stacking a cart with supplies and ammunition are "brought into killing range" through an infrared lens. The longer the poem spies on these enemies, however, the more individuated and representatively human they become:

       Are they talking about women
       or calling the Americans
 
       beaucoup dien cai dau?
       One of them is laughing,
       You want to place a finger
 
       to his lips & say "shhhh."
       You try reading ghost talk
 
       on their lips. They say
       "up-up we go," lifting as one.

This epiphanic recognition of mortal enemy as fellow mortal—as Whitman put it, "my enemy is dead, a man divine as myself is dead"—forms one of the thematic centers of war literature. Komunyakaa renders that tragic identification most indelibly in the terse "We Never Know." The poem recalls the famous trench scene from All Quiet on the Western Front, but in its collision of images drawn from the sacred and the technological, the sexual and the murderous—in short, from the chimerical paradoxes of modern combat—it derives unmistakably from that war we televised but never declared:

       He danced with tall grass
       for a moment, like he was swaying
       with a woman. Our gun barrels
       glowed white-hot.
       When I got to him,
       a blue halo
       of flies had already claimed him.
       I pulled the crumbled photograph
       from his fingers.
       There's no other way
       to say this: I fell in love.
       The morning cleared again,
       except for the distant mortar
       & somewhere choppers taking off.
       I slid the wallet into his pocket
       & turned him over, so he wouldn't be
       kissing the ground.

The last ten or so poems of Dien Cai Dau depict the war's aftermath—the panicked efforts of the South Vietnamese to camouflage their collaboration, the GI's alienating reentry into American society, the legacy of MIA's and Amerasian children, the cathartic reunion with the dead at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Lacking the immediacy of the combat lyrics, these poems sometimes rely on a kind of editorializing by juxtaposed details—"using gun mounts / for monkey bars, / Vietnamese children / play skin-the-cat"—and even, occasionally, on banality: "I'm a man fighting / with myself." Not so much implausible as overmanaged, these poems seem to fabricate paradoxes for effect; they're reductively theatrical. But in the poems growing directly out of combat, Komunyakaa makes a major contribution to the body of literature grappling with Vietnam—a poetry that pierces the artificial border between moral and aesthetic engagement.