Blog Assignment - Yusef Komunyakaa's "Facing It"

After reading “Facing It’ by Yusef Komunyakaa, I felt like I made an emotional connection to the poem. I have been to the memorial multiple times, so I understand the feelings he’s trying to convey. First of all, it seems to me that the speaker is a survivor of the Vietnam War. I can’t say this is Komunyakaa because he was just a correspondent, but it is very plausible. The memorial in itself is a symbol of the war and the people who were lost in it. The fact that he was reflecting on it means that the speaker was part of the war, evidenced by the fact that he almost expected to find his own name. There is also the part where he sees another man’s name and remembers how he died. I don’t want to say that this is an anti-war poem, but I think it forces people to look at the veterans of the war a bit differently. Even though it was an unpopular war, people still died. I feel like Komunyakaa was trying to get that feeling across when he wrote this poem. I personally feel badly for the speaker of it, because he seems to be haunted by the ghosts of his past.