By Hugh Martin

If “America is,” as John Updike wrote, “a vast conspiracy to make you happy,” then one might look—though, for awhile, you couldn’t look—at President Bush’s 1991 blanket ban on photographing coffins carrying dead American soldiers. Maybe the ban didn’t ensure “happiness,” but it did conspire to make sure the American public wouldn’t be bothered with images which might, perhaps, provoke unhappiness, or at least some discomfort.

In Yusef Komunyakaa’s poem, “To Have Danced With Death,” from his 1988 collection Dien Cai Dau, the narrator recounts returning alongside other soldiers from Vietnam, and then trying to exit the plane as two hearses arrive. As the speaker waits in line, he describes how their return gets halted, abruptly, when a “black sergeant first class . . . / stalled us on the ramp.” Shattering any warm and fuzzy feelings about homecoming, the speaker quips that this sergeant “didn’t kiss the ground either.” From there, the bleakness intensifies: “ . . . two hearses sheened up to the plane / & government silver-gray coffins / rolled out on silent chrome coasters.” Bizarre as it sounds, these hearses appear to provide brand-new coffins for the bodies of soldiers, probably in body bags or other containers, still on the plane.

The poem moves, like a roving camera, past these soldiers trying to exit the plane, past the coffins, and then into the crowd—a “forest of faces”—waiting inside the terminal. Overall, Komunyakaa creates a homecoming scene of the dead and the living that’s both risible and grim, cloddish and couth, silent and swaying. In the third and fourth stanzas, another hearse arrives and we learn an important detail about that sergeant as he refuses to move forward across the tarmac:

      . . . The empty left leg
      of his trousers shivered as another hearse
      with shiny hubcaps inched from behind a building…

      his three rows of ribbons rainbowed
      over the forest of faces through
      plate glass.

The phantom left leg, along with his impressive “rack”—military slang for a chest of ribbons—suggests some close calls in combat, not to mention, perhaps, a closer call which could’ve placed him in one of those coffins.

Halfway through the poem, however, in stanza five, the poem turns tonally as the sergeant, and the speaker, grasp the morbid absurdity of the moment. Komunyakaa describes the combination of sunlight against the shiny, polished metal on the soldiers, the caskets, the vehicles, the coasters:

      . . . Afternoon sunlight

      made surgical knives out of chrome
      & brass. He half smiled when
      the double doors opened for him

      like a wordless mouth taking back promises.
      The room of blue eyes averted his.

In his poems, Komunyakaa introduces American racial segregation, often subtly, as he does here—that quiet, potent detail of the “room of blue eyes.” Similarly, in one of his more well-known poems, “Facing It,” as the Vietnam Veteran gazes into the dark marble at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial wall, the speaker says, “My black face fades . . . ” But here, the tension of homecoming is rife with more complications when it’s suggested that this “black sergeant” must reintegrate into a predominantly white society that values his presence, and service, less. We can’t know this for certain, but that vivid action—“he half smiled”—implies a sort of ironic acceptance of his hesitant assimilation into American society as, now, a veteran amputee. Those “double doors,” of course, seem less inviting and more like clanky mechanized American jaws swallowing its wounded soldiers. The simile, too, speaks volumes about the sergeant’s internal state; that “wordless mouth taking back promises” might allude to the confused and awkward silence of the waiting citizens, the lies of the war, the inequality of treatment between black and white soldiers.

While this entire scene takes place just off the ramp of the plane—those other soldiers in the back of the line getting agitated about the wait—eventually this sergeant seems to have no choice but to get moving. Still, he refuses. He stalls.

      He stood there, searching

      his pockets for something:
      maybe a woman’s name & number
      worn thin as a Chinese fortune.

      I wanted him to walk ahead,
      to disappear through glass,
      to be consumed by music

      that might move him like Sandman Sims . . .

If some soldier—limbless or not—had held up the line getting off the plane in Atlanta when I returned from Iraq, it probably would’ve caused a fight. From my perspective as a veteran, the scene in the Komunyakaa poem screams of another typical military day of “hurry up and wait.”

Of course, it’s more than that.

The reference to “Sandman Sims,” the famous American tap dancer, hints at the strange and surprising action that ends the poem. Redolent of the title, along with the larger tradition of the “danse macabre” poem, Komunyakaa closes with the sergeant’s strangely surprising, yet—in the context of the soldiers’ acrimony— perfectly reasonable response: “ . . . he merely rocked on his good leg / like a bleak and soundless bell.”

Keeping in mind that “half smile,” it appears that the sergeant is aware of the theater of it all: the anxious soldiers waiting behind him, the nervous and fidgety civilians with “blue eyes” behind the glass, the coffins soon to be filled. Though he has no choice, it seems he decides to ironically embrace the grand show of homecoming, of the soldiers playing their roles. He will play his part, at least for now, as this amputee, but he’ll also, as a kind of protest, stall the entire scene with his lingering and dancing.

While the speaker wants the sergeant to move like Sandman Sims, who would often dance and tap on a thin bed of sand to enhance the sound of his steps, the sergeant’s dancing is “bleak & soundless.” Sims was also known, in the last half of the Twentieth Century, as the man who ushered unsuccessful acts off the stage at the world-famous Apollo Theatre in Harlem. In the poem’s context, Sims haunts the scene by appearing as a sort of carnivalesque pall-bearer—he ushers these wounded soldiers “offstage” since the audience has seen enough of this grotesque “dancing.” Sims’ famous tap dancing might also suggest the playing of “Taps” as a military funeral ritual.

In the end, that “soundless bell”—the last image in the poem—echoes a death knell for the dead soldiers, these living soldiers’ former lives, maybe the sergeant’s lost leg, and some unnamable spirit or naivete dying throughout the entire scene inside and outside of the American airport’s “plate glass . . . double doors.”

To not dance here, or at least sway, might be to give in too much, perhaps, to the grief and horror; it might also give in to, the sergeant probably knows, the trope of the silent traumatized returning veteran. He won’t allow the civilians to see him as only that; while their eyes “avert” his eyes, his little dance, and his refusal to go through the doors, insists that he be seen. He knows he could’ve come back horizontally, “rolled out on silent chrome coasters.” In a way, his halfhearted rocking celebrates, and mocks, how things turned out otherwise.

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Hugh Martin is the author of In Country (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2018), The Stick Soldiers (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2013), and So, How Was the War? (Kent State UP, 2010). His work has appeared in many publications including The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and GQ. He teaches at the United States Air Force Academy.