Willie Pete
Janet Kuypers
3/22/24
Seeing bombs during Viet Nam, the white smoke rising —
with each bomb exploding, I knew that smoke...
It was Willie Pete, white phosphorus —
you couldn’t put it out once it started burning.
That stuff could destroy the forests
so foreign to our U.S. troops.
Everything so volatile about that war, in a way, has become
a part of me, like it’s in my DNA. You look
at your tv screen and think it makes
no sense, but... It’s a part of me.
And for some reason, I need it.
I can’t explain why, but I do.
When you see the destruction of Willie Pete— that’s what we
all called it, but when you see that destruction,
you think of it existentially, like “oh,
violence is bad,” but when I see those
bombs going off, that was our key
to getting through that Hell.
I know you’ll never understand... and it sounds sick, but seeing
that white smoke from file footage, it brought it all
back to me — all those emotions came flooding
back like it was yesterday. And you can’t
understand, but that white smoke, to us, was
the closest thing we had to getting out alive.
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