Komunyakaa takes some of our easy assumptions about the art, oftentimes garnered from film and music, and turns them on ear. How frequently in films devoted to the war, for example, is music shown as a kind of unifying force among American soldiers? How many scenes out of a film such as Good Morning, Vietnam for instance, use music as the common denominator linking our troops in a shared cultural heritage? While it’s difficult to deny that music itself was a crucial part of the experience of the war, both in Vietnam and at home, notice how Komunyakaa’s Africn-American experience illuminates incidents in the poem "Tu Do Street" where music is not the unifying element we might have thought it to be …

…

[Stein cites the last twelve lines of the poem.]

In this brothel scene, hardly the most promising site for such revelations, the poem’s black speaker comes to an epiphanic understanding of "shared humanity" that, for the American combatants, runs deeper than their skin color. More importantly, the speaker recognizes a common humanity whose roots cross the superficial boundaries of nations, connecting those of black, white, yellow and recalling Komunyakaa’s "Recreating the Scene" [another poem in Dien Cai Dau], red skin. Surely the Vietnamese women these soldiers "run to hold," as well as their brothers who fight the Americans, understand what it is to be human upon this green globe and what sentence awaits each of us in death’s "underworld." However, this revelation does not come without its share of ominous undertones, for the figurative "tunnels" that link these men and women in their humanity also have a literal reality in the deadly maze of tunnels the Viet Cong use to ferry supplies, to fight and quickly disappear, and into which many American soldiers ventured never to return (as "Tunnels," the book’s second poem, memorably describes). Such ironies did not escape the attention of the Viet Cong, who employed every tactic available to them to undermine the morale of the American troops. …