Antonine Maillet: When are the soldiers are dead, bombs dropped, maybe we’ll have some peace

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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts

Women writers on peace and war

Antonine Maillet: One day war got declared

Antonine Maillet: That’s enough to give you some idea of what war is

Antonine Maillet: War succeeding war

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Antonine Maillet
La Sagouine
Translated by Wayne Grady

Well now, Gapi, he don’t even believe they’re fighting a real war in Vietnam, that’s how stubborn he is. Just a lot of made-up stories, he says. You don’t fight a war like that, according to him, and he knows what he’s talking about there, because he was in the war in the old country. And what he says is, from what he’s heard about Vietnam, it can’t happen like that. You fight a war between two armies, he says, on a battlefield, not in the streets and in the schools, where there’s women and children. And why would the States go into Vietnam in the first place, is what he wants to know. They don’t live there, they ain’t so much as stuck their noses in there before, what kind of dumb-ass American would want to go fight on the other side of the world in a war that has nothing to do with him?

When all the soldiers are dead and all the bombs are gone off, the maybe we’ll have some peace around here….

If they have to go dropping their bombs and training their soldiers to shoot straight, there won’t be no damage done around here. It’s the people over there who’ll get all the damage done to them, the women and the children in Vietnam. Don’t know what they ever did to deserve it, though. Don’t know at all….It’s probably not given to common folk like us to know about things like that. I mean, it’s not as though the government’s going to come down here and explain why they went to war or why they won’t let us fish in the sea no more. I don’t expect that’s any of our business, either. The way I figure it, the people being killed down there must be people like us, and I doubt they were given any say in the matter. They must have brought the war down on these people’s heads just like they came here and smashed our lobster traps on the beach, without warning or so much as a by-your-leave. That’s government business, and it ain’t none of our business, and there’s nothing we can do about it. The same as with the people in Vietnam. Anyways, once you’re dead there’s damn little you can say about it one way or the other. And don’t think they don’t know that.