Homecoming

Transformative journal entry (655 words)

April 22, 1975

The last few days have had me all muddled up. They are pulling troops out of Vietnam. Things just
have not been happening for us, so the high-ups back home decided to call it quits. Australia’s
involvement in Vietnam is coming to an end. They have been packing things in and sending troops and
equipment back to home soil. It has taken a few months, but I am one of the one of the last of the few
Australian troops to be evacuated, they are picking them up, those they can find, and bringing them
home.

I am writing this on the ride home. Big cargo plane, filled to the brim with my fellow soldiers and I can
feel a constant rush of emotions. While I am extremely thrilled and happy that I am coming home, I
cannot help but feel upset. As bad as things were in the jungle you still had a sense of freedom, almost
a primal freedom that you would not get back in cities of New Jersey. Being stuck in this jungle has
changed me in all sorts of ways I feel. I have seen terrible things. Things that most people would not
even dream of. I have seen my brothers torn to shreds, blown to smithereens, die from infections
from those bastard commies and yet, in a certain way, I think I am going to miss that freedom that
this god forsaken place gives you.

All I can feel is the rumble of the plane and the roar of the engines, it reminds me much of the last few
months. The rumbles of the convoys of trucks hauling men to the base, to bring them home. It helped
give me hope that I would not need to continue seeing horrors, one day that would be me. And of
course, my day has come. When you look around you can see a window. If you are lucky enough you
can look through it and see down where the villages are, where many grueling battles took place. Look
further on and you can see the curvature of the earth over the glistening Pacific Ocean.

It makes me remember all the good and bad times we had while in the jungle. We used to give each
other haircuts, personally, I preferred the classic crew-cut, but my friend Charlie expressed his curly
red hair. We used to laugh as we ate steaming chow mein. There was this one time when we had to
use goats’ milk to boil the rice in, it tasted worse than anything I have ever eaten before! Later that
week we were trekking through the thick bush when Charlie kicked a land mine hidden under some
shrubs. Poor fella was scheduled to go home after another month. He was a good friend, and a brave
soldier. He is coming home now, too late, too early.

Whenever there was no gunfire being volleyed in every direction, there was an eerie silence. For the
most part at least, occasionally, the noble jets would whale like hounds but aside from that there was
silence. Which mostly was a good thing, you are not afraid of having your brain blown through every
second. The major downside to the silence is that you do not know where the enemy is. The thing
about the Vietnamese is they are sneaky, they have tunnels, hiding places, anything that is hard for us
to find or see; they have something to do with it. At least with the roar of gunfire you can hear where
they are, but, in the silence. Right now, the eerie silence feels imminent and yet there is no danger. I
keep having a constant feeling that I am being stalked or any second now something is going to go
incredibly wrong, and yet, it is not. Everything is fine, everything is calm. The boys are on their way
home.
Writers Statement- (321)

Bruce Dawe explores the feelings that soldier might feel as they come home from Vietnam when the
Australian troops were being pulled out of the conflict in his poem titles ‘homecoming’. It comes off
as a mix of patriotic and anti-war work.

Dawe uses mostly imagery to paint a picture in the readers mind of what a soldier being pulled out
might see or experience. He does this by describing many certain things like the curve of the Pacific
Ocean, the zipping up of green plastic bags, most likely referring the dead troops in body bags and the
all the convoys taking either live or dead troops to the tarmac ready to be transported home.
Depending on which interpretation you take. To add more impact to the poem he also used repeated
words at the start of the sentence. This can be seen in the second to sixth line when the word they’re
(referring to the troops) is used each time and then used in the last line when it repeats the last line
of the first stanza.

The intended audience was likely those who were pro-war. It shows the horrors’ that can be seen in
war. The line “they’re zipping up the green plastic bags” could easily be interpreted as body bags
making the entire poem being about the dead soldiers’ bodies all being taken home, another line that
could show this is “they’re rolling them out of the deep freeze lockers”. With numerous lines like this
it could easily be interpreted in this darker yet more insightful way. this interpretation the line “Now,
too late, too early” makes a lot more sense. Came home too late, died too early.

The stylistic features taken from the original text was mainly the imagery and what a soldier would
have seen when experiencing that, such as the curly red hair of Charlie or the blue curve of the Pacific
Ocean.