APO 96225
By: Larry Rottman

I actually really liked this poem.  I feel that it has an important message, and I personally didn't find the message hard to understand.  When the poem begins, the speaker states that a young soldier was away at war, and he wrote his family a letter.  All that it said was "Dear Mom, sure rains a lot here" (846).  His mother's response was that the family was worried about him, and they wanted to hear how he really was doing.  The soldier avoided the topic of the war.  In his next letters, he mentioned monkeys and the sunsets.  His mother begged him to actually share what was going on.  They wanted to hear how he was doing and learn about what he was experiencing.  To satisfy his worried mother, the soldier wrote a shockingly honest letter.  "Today I killed a man.  Yesterday, I helped drop napalm on women and children" (846).  His father responded to this letter, saying to be less graphic and depressing.  That letter had bothered his mother, and she found herself even more upset after learning the truth.  I think that this shows situational irony.  There is irony in the fact that the soldier's parents pleaded for him to share what was really going on with him while he was away at war.  However, when he told his family what he had done, they asked for him to write less-depressing letters.  He had done exactly what they wanted, and they asked for him to write how he had previously written the letters before.  I think that this reveals an important and applicable message.  The tragedies and events that soldiers go through cannot be handled well by those back at home.  They do not understand the situations that soldiers are put in, and they find the actions of the soldiers to be very disturbing.  Just like there is physical distance between soldiers and their loved ones at home, there is distance between their understandings and handling of the realities of war.