Asked how their lives and their writing were shaped by their service in the Vietnam War, Carl Mabbs-Zeno and Rodger Martin both joked that they might not be the best veterans to talk to.

Neither has stayed involved in formal veterans activities, although Martin, who has a cabin of Hancock, organizes the reading of the names of veterans at the Memorial Day ceremony every year in Harrisville, where he lives. Mabbs-Zeno, who retired to Peterborough after a globetrotting career as an economist, and Martin, an award-winning poet, author and professor of journalism and creative writing at Keene State College, both served in Vietnam in the end of the 1960s. Neither Martin nor Mabbs-Zeno, both lifelong writers, wrote about their experiences in Vietnam until decades later.

“You just wanted to push it down, make it go away,” Martin said. “It was the last thing I wanted to write about.”

“I just wanted to forget about it and never look back,” Mabbs-Zeno agreed. “I’m not proud of my time in Vietnam; I’m not proud of the things we had to do there. I am proud that I served my country for 35 years as an economist for the State Department.”

Martin received a New Hampshire Council on the Arts Fiction Fellowship for his novel, “The Nemo Poems,” based on his time in Vietnam, which he has plans to revise and get back in print. More about his work can be found at pw.org/directory/writers/rodger_martin. Mabb-Zeno’s Vietnam novel, “A Pale Shade of Honor,” and his other works are available on Amazon and at Toadstool Bookshop in Peterborough.

Neither Martin nor Mabbs-Zeno had considered writing about their experiences in the war until each came across the work of World War I poets Sigrid Sassoon and Wilfred Owen. Both Sassoon and Owen, who met while recovering from injuries at Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh, Scotland, served in the trenches, with Owen dying at just 25. Mabbs-Zeno and Martin, who met on the board of the Monadnock Writers’ Group, both decided to write fictionalized accounts of their time in Vietnam after reading Sassoon’s and Owen’s poems about World War I. 

Mabbs-Zeno, who had been in and out of college for several years in the 1960s,  was drafted into the 173rd Airborne Army Division in 1969. After about a year of training, he was sent to Bong Son, which had seen one the largest battles of the war in 1965, and assigned to the 11 Bravo, or small arms infantry. Mabbs-Zeno’s unit engaged in “Hawk missions,” where small groups of six to eight men were assigned to reconnaissance or to search and destroy targets in the vicinity, such as machine-gun nests.

“The only reason we did it was for each other, for the men,” Mabbs-Zeno said. “If one of my men was going to do it, I was going to do it. We had to go out and look for the target and we had to kill anyone we saw along the way. Mostly we just tried to keep our heads down and come back alive. That was the whole goal. We all just wanted to come home. There was a very high probability of not coming back whole in my unit. There were so many mines and so many people lost limbs.”

Mabbs-Zeno said he was totally disillusioned at what he saw in Vietnam and only wanted to come back alive.

“I never understood why,” he said. “What were we doing there? Why were we killing these people? We never got a good answer for that. We had no idea what was happening in the rest of the war; we had no idea what was happening at home. We had no communication. We wrote letters, we got letters, but as far as the big picture, we didn’t know anything. We called back home ‘the world.’”

“All we talked about was getting back to ‘the world,’” Martin agreed.

Martin, whose mother was British, grew up with a clear understanding of the effects of war. He lived in England as a child, in a house with a bomb shelter in the backyard, and two of his uncles had been killed in World War II. Martin, who had originally planned to attend West Point, enlisted at age 21 while waiting for an appointment at the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy in King’s Point, N.Y. Martin went in as an enlisted man and was promoted to sergeant within a matter of months.

“I was one of two college-educated people in my unit. A lot of my guys could not read or write at all,” he said.

Mabbs-Zeno had the same experience, later serving as unit clerk, because he was one of the few men with any education.

“Most of the men in my unit could not read or write, and many of them could not speak any English,” he said.

Martin was quickly promoted to a squadron leader. He realized later that his engineering group’s mission was to prepare the border for the American invasion of Cambodia, which started on May 4, 1970. Years later, Martin learned that the base he served at was a half-mile from the North Vietnamese army command post.

“We never understood why we weren’t just overrun by the VC (Viet Cong) out there, but it was because they had all been pulled away for the Tet Offensive,” Martin said.

Martin remembers looking out the windows of the bus when he first arrived in Vietnam, on his way to Thien Ngon, the installation at the Cambodian border.

“There were vendors in all the towns selling these beautiful silk jackets and shirts and flags, and they all showed Vietnam, and there was no line through Vietnam on any of those maps,” Martin said. “I knew a lot about Civil War history. I looked at this and said, ‘Oh, boy. We’re in the middle of a civil war here, and this is not going to work.’”

Forty days before the end of his tour, a mortar hit the ground seven feet from where Martin was working outside a bunker. He considers himself very fortunate that his back was turned to the blast, and while he took shrapnel on his back and the back of his head, he recovered and returned to the unit, where he served as clerk until he shipped home. Martin kept a journal of his time in Vietnam (which was illegal), but he had no desire to write about his experiences. After being sent to Fort Devens in Massachusetts, he immediately enrolled in college classes, partly to get a night pass. At his first English class, Martin recalls walking in and seeing a ponytailed young professor in sandals sitting on a desk.

“But then he started reading poetry. He read ‘Dulce Et Decorum Est,’ by Wilfred Owen, which Owen wrote in the trenches in World War I,”  Martin said. “And right there, in that very moment, I realized I was not alone. War is all the same. What soldiers experience is all the same, whether it was in Rome or the Civil War or World War I or Vietnam.”

Both Mabbs-Zeno and Martin later wrote novels based on their experiences in Vietnam.

“My wife was glad to read that it wasn’t my story,” Mabbs-Zeno said. “I am very much in it, the character is like me, and of course it’s based on things I saw, but it’s a novel.”

Both Mabbs-Zeno and Martin have been back to Vietnam, and both were struck by the youth of the population.

“It’s ancient history to them,” Mabbs-Zeno  says. “It’s not even on their radar.” 

Martin, returning to the site of the mortar attack which wounded him, learned that the area on the Cambodian border has been turned into a national park dedicated to the protection of trees. 

“After the horrific degradation we inflicted on that landscape, it was the most wonderful gift to see that,” he said.