How a kid from an ordinary American family gets turned into a weapon whose humanity can never be eradicated — and whose self-forgiving peace can never be fully realized — is the subject of Al Miller’s viscerally explored collection of poems and prose narratives.

The structure of “A Reason for Kindness: Selected Poems” is chronological. However, because so many events come with overlapping references to the past, present and future, the timelines in this collection often seem to take place simultaneously.

Al’s opening poem provides a good example. Describing the farm where he grew up, Al wants to “smell the scent of sassafras” and hear “bullfrogs talking the daylight down.” But once the Demerol wears off and Al turns on his plastic-coated mattress, you’re looking at a hospital ward filled with haggard young men. You see in their eyes what they see in Al’s, and then it hits you: the breaking bones and tearing flesh. 

Al is the 10th child in a farming family in Missouri. His eldest sister was run over by a tractor when she was 8 years old, a cousin met his end in Korea and an older brother fought Vietnam. 

Drafted at the age of 19, Al was continually reminded in boot camp that he was no more important than a “maggot.” The people he was being sent to kill were branded with slurs, and the targets at which he learned to shoot M16s were named after female genitalia.

Al’s first combat-related mission in Vietnam was to retrieve some lifeless bodies after an enemy ambush. He couldn’t tell if the boy he found was Asian, Anglo or Black:

“We wrapped him in a poncho that would protect him from the rain,
tied the poncho to a bamboo pole,
carried him as if we were all going home that night
in a pilgrimage of the bewildered.
I regret the way we dropped him to the ground near morning,
Brushing one palm against the other as though we were finished.“

Al grew up knowing how to handle guns, but it was always for hunting food. Entering a hooch on a routine patrol, he surprised a Vietcong officer:

“He tried to talk to me with three rounds in his chest.
I can tell from here he reached for me …
I shot him in the delicate pink bubbles of his lungs.
He drowned in his blood …
whether I was trained for it, it is the same.
After murder, you understand it doesn’t matter what it is called.“

On his 21st birthday, it was Al’s turn to take a bullet:

“… Lying face down in my helmet of blood,
The wound a small fountain.
I would like to report: it is in the realm where fear exists.“

One Bronze Star, a Purple Heart and several years later, Al prepares for the second of his two trips of redemption to Vietnam. He fears his soul will never again be whole if he “didn’t do something on behalf of others who were intentionally made to suffer … for a world without remorse from the grief that comes of brutal and murderous intentional actions.”

Scenes of abandonment and loss are everywhere Al goes: the homeless children of American fathers that no one will take in, others crippled with war injuries due to a lack of medical resources, and the young woman visiting the hotels where Americans stay, asking of her Texan father, “Do you know him?”

Al has since come to realize that the most effective way to live at peace with himself is to advocate for peace among others. He does this in large part by reading his poems and prose narratives in schools, libraries, prisons and community centers. But Vietnam never quits:

“There is no other way out, no way down the alley.
no holidays, no citations, no shiny ribbons.
The doorway to the underworld — no other path
no way to leave, no walk away from him lying there.“

A public reading and celebratory launching of Al’s “A Reason for Kindness” will take place on Sunday, July 19, starting at 3 p.m. in the Montague Common Hall.  

Richard Andersen is a resident of Montague.