Connecting Letters and Poems Fifty Years After the Vietnam War

by Annette Langlois Grunseth

What started out as preserving and publishing my brother’s letters from Vietnam for my family became a hybrid of memoir, biography, history, and poetry to honor my brother and all Vietnam veterans. The journey to publishing Combat and Campus: Writing through War (Elm Grove Press, 2021) spanned more than five decades.

My brother, Peter Langlois, was drafted in 1967 after graduation from the University of Wisconsin, Madison with a journalism degree. After being hastily trained by the Army and sent to Vietnam, he began writing letters home about ambushes, snipers, and horrific battles while living inside an armored personnel carrier in the jungles of Vietnam. His descriptive letters did not shield us from the danger and fear he experienced in infantry combat.

The letters were not censored. They were even published in our hometown newspaper in Wausau, unedited. His letters spoke of a war that wasn’t winnable and often contradicted news reports we heard at home.

For decades my parents kept the letters in their safe deposit box. Peter never wanted to publish a book of his letters; it was too painful. He pursued a public relations career, married and had children, then sadly, died from an agent orange cancer at age 59, in 2004.

My mother’s final wish was, please publish the book. I became keeper of the letters, now archived in my safe deposit box. Over the decades, I read those letters so many times I felt as though I had been there, minus the danger and terror.

A potential publisher suggested I add my story to the book about my concurrent UW-Madison experience of antiwar protests and the National Guard on campus wielding rifles and bayonets outside our classrooms.

How would I bridge his story, written in thirty-six letters, together with my campus experiences, my grief about war, his death, and how negatively our soldiers were treated when they returned home from Vietnam?

 I dug in. I gathered up my antiwar poems. My muse kicked in as I wrote poems to cope with my brother’s death. In working with the letters, I was even dreaming about them.

Peter’s vivid letters became my poetry prompts.

Letters as prompts

The poem goes on to describe how hunting and Boy Scouting from his youth helped him survive in the jungle. The poem concludes:

I had finally written about my survivor’s guilt about the war, the draft, and being exempt because I was a girl.

In Peter’s October 1, 1968 letter he wrote, each day we keep adding sandbags to our bunkers in anticipation of a mortar attack on the battalion logger site. Everyone is tense and dog tired. The sun burns daily and torrents of rain make the landscape muddier every night. This is Vietnam at present. A muddy stinking hell. This paragraph prompted the poem, “The Arrival,” noting the stark contrast between his first days in Vietnam and my first days of college in Madison: 

In Vietnam, it was obvious to Peter the war was not winnable. This sentiment was also at the heart of the antiwar protests at home. Secretary of Defense McNamara in Washington was still telling us we were winning—because he focused on enemy body counts. What about American deaths? This dichotomy was my prompt to write “Measures of War”: “Walter Cronkite, in our living room every night, /…half a million boots on the ground in Vietnam. / Secretary of Defense McNamara / …must measure progress of this war. / What can he count on to confirm success?”

I countered that with “My brother writes of combat, jungle sweeps, ambushes, / his buddies dying, grief pouring out like blood. / He asks, why are we here? What’s the objective?” The poem ends: “The common denominator is death, / where every body counts.”

The muse nudged deeper. I thought about the negative treatment of our Vietnam veterans, Peter’s war-related cancer, his death, and the three-day funeral honoring his life. In “Irony of it All,” the grief of his life and my grief poured out. It had taken decades for me to process how this war changed our family forever.

Welcome Home, Brother is the universal greeting Vietnam vets give to each other. It is a unique bond. When they returned there was little or no welcome home so they continue to welcome each other, even today.

Peter died too young, I missed him. Writing poems in response to his letters felt like a good visit with my brother.

I laid out the manuscript on the dining room table, interspersed poems with the letters, rearranging them to fit the storyline. I was visioning how the book might help others find closure and a semblance of meaning out of the madness of war.

A faded slip of paper from Peter’s 1998 visit to the Vietnam Memorial Wall in Washington, DC, was tucked in the back of his Vietnam photo album. Out of curiosity one day, I googled the name of Peter’s much-admired commanding officer who was killed in Vietnam; his name was on that slip of paper. From that search, I discovered the officer’s wife is an author and coincidentally, a book publisher! We connected, corresponded, she read the manuscript, and was taken by its uniqueness: War and antiwar, letters and poetry. After this incredible connection, Ruth Crocker, of Elm Grove Press, helped me locate soldiers from my brother’s unit. One veteran wrote to say he was in one of the battles mentioned, then sent me a photo of himself from that day.

In the past year, I heard from professed non-poetry readers. Several are high ranking military leaders who told me they related to the letters and the poetry. They sent emails saying how they were moved by the book; more than one person said the poems, especially, brought tears to their eyes.

A retired colonel from Washington, DC asked me to send him an autographed copy of the last poem in the book to frame and hang on his wall next to photos of several generations of his family members who fought in past wars.

Another soldier emailed to say he was diagnosed with the same rare cancer as Peter, but survived with treatment that had been perfected from earlier cases such as Peter’s.

Those born long after the war tell me they are learning about the history and politics of the Vietnam War from the book.

After five decades, poetry paired with and prompted by Peter’s well-written letters emerged as Combat and Campus: Writing through War, a hybrid of memoir, biography, and history to honor my brother, Peter Langlois, and all Vietnam veterans. And, readers still mention the poetry and how it touched them.

What’s hiding in your attic or family desk that you could write about?