By Jan Barry
Fifty years ago
To the minute
… a sound
(I could hear quite well then)
like a soda can pop top
my cells knew
I leaped up as if I were spring loaded
the grenade exploded
… yet, the exhilaration, escape, defiance of death
Was nectar, food for my later madness
This is the kind of kick-ass poetry Dominic Albanese worked for decades to write. But when he got home from a Special Forces tour as a teenager chasing danger in Vietnam, a lifetime of distractions kept getting in the way: joy riding on motorcycles, running illegal drugs, getting addicted to illegal drugs, protesting the war with Vietnam Veterans Against the War, chasing women and more women, raising a daughter, doing fine-tune mechanic jobs on expensive sports cars and on hot stolen cars, staging robberies, enduring a stint in Folsom Prison, then a long rehabilitation with AA and CA and church folks and caring friends. Now he’s a retiree in Florida writing his recollections in poetry collections and memoirs.
The snippet of poetry above is excerpted from “April 17, 1964” which was published in Bastards Had the Whole Hill Mined: Vietnam Poems (Les Editions du Zaporogue, 2015). These war poems describe being dropped into Southeast Asian jungles on long-range patrols: “down the trail/ comes Charlie, with bags o rice/ bamboo medical supplies ammo/ wrapped in banana leaf packs/ wearing the brown hats/ with the little yellow star…” Then he cuts through what he calls the “ra ra bullshit” of war stories. “Well you have never seen/ four guys/ lie so still, so quiet so scared/ never to admit it in public”.
He also takes readers into a back alley in Saigon to share beer and reefer with a “black hair charm woman,” who tells a young soldier his fortune: “she smiled/ I can remember it like two days ago/ in Cham a lost tongue I had never heard before/ but instantly knew/ it was not a spell or a curse/ it was a sad and old/ sin loi sou di duc du kei/ (you will not die only suffer for years to come)/ now again fifty years later/ I wonder how she knew”.
In a companion poetry collection, Then N Now, published in 2015, Albanese notes that poetry helped keep him going through self-destructive times, hanging out between escapades with New York poets at the St. Marks Poetry Project and San Francisco poets of the Beat generation. “Other than having written poetry for decades,” he writes, “I have no further training in poetry—other than a deep and real trust in the healing nature of it, and the absolute pleasure it gave me to knock one out of the park.”
Among the most astute poems in this collection is “Departed But Not Gone.”
this morning
between dark to dawn
I saw a man
pushing an
empty wheel chair
causeway side walk
both side river view
it hit me
She was gone
he walked the
chair without her
not wanting her ghost
to miss
days attendance sun rise
over barrier island mangrove banks
A junior high school-dropout from Coney Island who got a GED in the Army, Albanese prides himself on writing poems in ungrammatical Brooklynese. In writing a memoir titled Dear Miss B, he writes more studiously in homage to his 7th grade English teacher who encouraged him as a flailing student hustling odd jobs and stealing cars on the side. Escaping jail time by joining the Army, after his father and a priest lied about his age, he wrote letters to Miss B from Vietnam. Years later, the woman’s daughter tracked him down on social media to share that his favorite teacher had died and mailed him a boxful of his wartime letters she had kept.
Using the recovered letters as memory aides, Albanese unravels the convoluted story of how a wise-guy kid who couldn’t sit still in grade school ended up as a Vietnamese-speaking communications specialist on Special Forces missions in Vietnam and Laos. “My first patrol up in the hills,” he wrote in an early letter, “hard to even say, how not only is it hard to pass thru the jungle, but when ya do get on the hill side, the rocks, sometimes fall, and you gotta be very careful how you move…So far it is more like some movie than it is a real war, but, bugs, snakes, birds who are loud, and monkeys who make more noise than you ever heard, one of the Yards [GI slang for Montagnards] told me when the birds and monkey are quiet you got a big problem…”
More than a year later, in March 1965, he wrote Miss B: “I am going back to Okinawa, and with just some good moves, I can stay there, or come back to CONUS, and be, outta all this madness.” Pushing the boundaries on what could be put in a letter from the war zone, he adds: “I will tell you the whole mood has changed here, more guys getting killed, and way more ambushes, outright camp overruns, and this is now, really starting to look like a war.”
Getting out of the Army in March 1966 with several thousand dollars, “a few ounces of Cambodian Red Weed, a .45 pistol, two sets of civilian clothes, and a sale brochure for Harley motorcycles,” Albanese set out from California to New York aiming for a life of adventure. His first civilian job, as recounted in a recent memoir titled 101 Elsie St (Poetic Justice Books, 2023), was hauling kilos of marijuana in a VW van from Arizona to sell to mob connections in Coney Island. In the midst of cross-country drug mule treks, he spent some time hanging out with a girl friend in New York’s East Village, where in the summer of 1967 he hooked up with some other angry vets to help launch Vietnam Veterans Against the War.
I remember Dom as being exceedingly bitter, haranguing me to make harsher statements than I felt comfortable with in my fledgling public speaking role as a VVAW organizer. I don’t recall us talking about poetry, although I also dropped by poetry events at St. Marks Church-in-the-Bowery, an East Village institution.
And then, like many vets who helped get a radical antiwar veterans’ group off the ground, Dominic Albanese disappeared. Decades later, he popped up on Facebook, interacting with vet poets and posting firecracker bursts of short poems. One day he wrote that he needed money to pay some bill and was selling copies of his books at discount. Turns out he’s the author of more than a dozen collections of poetry and two memoirs. Many of his books are listed on Amazon and lulu.com.
In his book description on Amazon for a 2019 poetry collection titled Disconnected Memories, he notes: “I have been writing poetry since I was twelve years old, and within sight of where I am sitting at the moment are more than seventy-five notebooks full of poems. When I returned to the United States from Vietnam in March of 1966 I spent at least fifteen years--in the words of Bryon--being ‘mad and bad and dangerous to know’. I suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, a malady that could not then be named--for a few years I had an almost terminal case of it. Crime, drugs, chopped reality, fast motorcycles, women, rum and cocaine, all of these just about killed me. I went to prison for a while. Through all of that I never stopped writing poetry, even if some of my poems from those times are as dreadful as the years themselves were.”
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