Facing It

The poem “Facing It” by Yusef Komunyakaa is a meditation on the first time Komunyakaa visited the US Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC. Komunyakaa served in the Vietnam War as an Army journalist for the military newspaper, Southern Cross, until he was discharged in 1966. He began writing about the war approximately 14 years after coming home from Vietnam.

Prior to this, he had only written one poem about his experience in the war, and “Facing It” marked a pivotal point in Komunyakaa’s writing career. The war poem was critical in inspiring one of his most acclaimed collections of poetry, the 1988 collection Dien Cai Dau, which heavily reflects on the consequences and traumas of the Vietnam War, as Komunyakaa grapples with his memories, choices, and relationships from those years of his life.

In many ways, “Facing It” represents a generous and tender visit to the brutal past, embodied by the poet “facing”—confronting—the physical reminder of the men and women who fought and died in the war. Although many literary critics have praised the poem for being humane and poignant, others have commented on how indifferent it is towards the true horrors of the war during which many Vietnamese and Americans were killed or brutalized.