The Battle Of Bong Son Analysis

Finney recalls the battle of Bong Son and, therefore, draws an image of a peaceful helpless person waving with a white handkerchief: Three times a day the helicopter flies by in a low crawl. The grandmother insists on not being helpless, so she waves a white hand- kerchief that she puts on and takes off her head toward the cameraman and the pilot who remembers well the art of his mirrored-eyed posture in his low-flying helicopter: Bong Son, Dong Ha, Pleiku, Chu Lai. (Head off & Split 13: 9-16)
Finney portrays a Vietnam-war scene where helicopters fly at low crawl to hit, not to save people. Battles of Bong Son, Dong Ha , Pleiku , Chu Lai form an aural image fearful as well as deadening. These air-strikes stand in
She stresses the fact that the people are “not broken” although they are “dark, starving, abandoned, dehydrated, brown, and cumulous” (Head off & Split 13:20-21). Those people have developed an invincible stamina to resist racial discrimination. Finney hammers different societal problems, one of which is education. The woman who is going to and fro with “pom-pom legs” carry a misspelled sign “Pleas Help Pleas”. The frantic movement of the woman completes the two opposing images started at the beginning of the poem: the image of a cheerleader who is nervously moving carrying brightly colored balls, and that of a desperate badly educated colored woman who unintentionally and unwittingly dropped the “e” from “please”. Finney stresses this point: do you know
Finney draws an image of complete despair with uneducated people who are left behind and are not paid due attention since “Regulations require an e be at the end / of any pleas e before any national response / can be taken” (Head off & Split 14: 43-45). Red tape reflects languid/passive reaction of the government towards the disaster that befell colored people only because they misspelled a word. The national council has not shown any kind of sympathy as it took them four days before they decided to drop “one bottle of water, or any case / of dehydrated baby formula, on the roof / where the e has rolled off into the flood, / (but obviously not splashed / loud enough) (Head off & Split 14: 48-52). The aural image of dropping the bottle and the formula is compared to that of an “e” rolling off into the flood but was not resounding enough to catch the attention of the rescuers. The antithetical relation between the two images stresses the distress of both the victims and the government: the rolling of the bottle and the formula gives a shred of hope for a new life but that of the “e” ends every hope for rescue. The four days highlight the prolonged fluctuation between hope and despair, life and death. The “green plastic window awning” (Head off & Split 15: 58) that covered them up symbolizes