By Byron Spooner

Back in 1972 I helped put together an all-day Vietnam War Teach-In at my high school.  There were lectures and poetry, music and debates.  And although the subject was serious, the atmosphere was celebratory; everyone had the day off from classes and there was the buzz that always pervades when a bunch of people get together to do good work.

All that changed in the middle of the afternoon when half a dozen members of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War marched wordlessly down the center aisle of the auditorium and onto the stage.

The festivities ended and the serious work began as these scary, grizzled veterans of the jungle war stared down the crowd of fresh-faced teenagers.  They communicated with each other silently, as they had in the jungle, in American Sign Language.  Suddenly, no one else’s opinion mattered anymore; the moral authority of the issue was theirs and they weren’t going to surrender it to anyone.

These haunted soldiers, with sad and bitter stories, brought the war into that high school that afternoon in a way no one else could have.  A day of teen-aged protest was transformed into an experience that no one there would forget.

A poetry reading by Jon Michael Turner, a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War who was in town over the weekend for Friends-sponsored readings at the Beat Museum and Kaleidoscope Gallery, is a similar experience. This 24 year-old veteran, who served two combat tours in Iraq as a Marine machine gunner and now suffers from PTSD, seems to carry the entire weight of our country’s misadventure on his small shoulders.

His family has had a soldier in every American war since the Revolution.  He commands the podium in a similar fashion to those VVAW soldiers did a generation ago, not through a bunch of macho/military bullshit, but by the simple and obvious enormity of what he has done and witnessed and how that has affected his life.

He has, since returning, taken up the art of paper and book making, working out of the Green Door Studio in Burlington, Vermont. He has also travelled with Combat Paper Project, telling his story while teaching other veterans the art of papermaking and of telling stories of their own. Jon, and other veterans active in the CPP, have been pulping their military uniforms and making them into paper.  It is a process that heals them in profound ways.

Saturday night at Kaleidoscope he gave all of us in attendance sheets of this paper made from his own uniform blended with his father’s.  It was unexpectedly emotional to hold this symbol of not only his rejection of the war but of his family’s two-hundred-and-fifty-year history as well.

Jon’s reading from his recent book  Eat the Apple was emotional and transformative as well.  (The title comes from an expression common in the Marine Corps “Eat the apple, fuck the corps, I don’t work for you no more.”)

The other veterans and poets (the event was co-sponsored by the Revolutionary Poets Brigade) on hand contributed what they could, but the event was all Jon.

He has transformed himself through his writing and his work with others since I last saw him two years ago.  For one thing, he is clean and sober and he’s improving as a poet (which is beside the point but still worth mentioning) and seems less angry, more at peace with himself and his world.

We need look no further for proof of the power of poetry than this.  The alchemy of turning uniforms into paper and pain into poetry is an enormously powerful one that heals the poet/artisan and his audience.  It’s sad that we have to keep doing this.

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