Between Oz and Vietnam

On the web Dare I Read is where you come for your Oz-themed poems. This one I found in an anthology:

Eagle in the Land of Oz

I was talking

to a friend

and I noticed

a tin

leg

               hanging on his wall

he said he

got it

               in cambodia

there had been

an air strike

on a

               n. v. a. hospital

it had been on

one

               of the bodies

I thought of the 

Tin Man of Oz

               who had no heart

lions and tigers and bears

Don Receveur

The last line makes clear that the poet is thinking about the 1939 MGM Wizard of Oz movie. (That’s where the “lions and tigers and bears” line occurs.) In the movie the Tin Man was made by a tinsmith. “He forgot to give me a heart,” the Tin Man says. 

In L. Frank Baum’s original story the Tin Woodman was first an ordinary flesh and blood person. A wicked witch curses the man’s ax so that it swings back on its user, chopping off an arm. The man goes to a tinsmith who replaces the missing limb with a tin one. Unlike a prosthetic in the real world, in Oz the tin replacements (eventually the man’s entire body, including his head) are as alive as the parts they replace. Presumably, the tinsmith thought a heart replacement no more important than a set of tin intestines or lungs.

In a sequel Baum eventually introduces a doppelgänger for the Tin Woodman, a Tin Soldier. Similar origin story. 

In his dark Oz novel, The March of the Tin Soldiers, Steve Ahlquist has the wicked witch herself providing the prosthetics, though in this case the replacement parts are the ones that are cursed, forcing their new owners to obey the magical maker. Seems like a good way to build an army.

We don’t know if the person killed in the hospital in Don Receveur’s poem was a soldier, but it’s a good guess. Perhaps the soldier was heartless? Or maybe the war? — after all, bombing a hospital is a war crime. Receveur leaves it to the reader to find meaning in the connection between Oz and Vietnam. 

source:

Carrying the Darkness: the poetry of the Vietnam war

edited by W. D. Ehrhart

1989. Texas University Press, Lubbock TX