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The back cover of As soon as Upon A Time in Vietnam by Jerry Neren, (Pearl Editions, 104 pp., $14. 95, paper), a great book of poetry, informs us that the author "served in the United States militaries." No details are provided about his service.  Find More Details On This Page , the winner of the 2010 Pearl Poetry Prize., features a stunning and tragic cover by Marilyn Johnson that reveals a stag in the forest with an arrow through his neck.

Neren's Beginning inform us that "the story tracks a boy from the time he is drafted into the Army right out of college; suffers a total mental breakdown throughout his trip of battle responsibility; continues to deal with his mental injury up to his return home; and finally discovers a method to reconstruct his demolished life." The reader encounters "soldiers poisoned by Agent Orange" in the very first section of the book, embeded in Basic Training, which offered me a shock.

The phrase used to explain the victims of Representative Orange hit me hard: "their withins feasted on like plankton by a whale." I understand firsthand how that feels. Jerry Neren The poet creates 2 characters: Eugene and Dominick, classical music-loving friends who graduate from college, are drafted, and are sent together to Vietnam.

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Eugene goes nuts. He then suffers in VA care from age 24 to age 41, that piece of his life lost forever. The story of Eugene and Dominick is told in four areas: The Prologue covers boot camp. Part One, "The Battle Front," deals with how the killing is performed in Vietnam.

Part Three briefly reveals us the "New World." This beautiful, lyrical narrative poem touches many of the same bases that lots of memoirs and books and narratives do, consisting of Agent Orange and the taking of human ears. However in this poem we get "oceans of Representative Orange" and "lockets made from human ears." We discover the story of Eugene, who, like a chameleon, "took on the color of Vietnam: the color of insanity." If I were still teaching college course on the Vietnam War, I would make Once Upon a Time in Vietnam a required text.