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On Board a Warship, His Only Protest Weapon Was through a Typewriter

At the height of the Vietnam War, Richard L. Brocaw had the difficult job of categorizing the losses of men stationed on board the U.S.S. Yorktown. As a data processing technician for the U.S. Navy, Brocaw wrestled with a sense of being involved yet oddly disconnected from the war—and, like so many service members, powerless to do anything about it, let alone protest. What he was able to do was write—feelingly, frankly, and movingly—about the craziness all around.

See the Pretty Deer collects more than two dozen poems and free-form essays from Brocaw’s service in 1968-69. Completed in secret, these pieces represent a silent protest by a remarkable and prescient intellect whose work was lost for four decades and finally recovered. The result is a powerful indictment not just of needless war, but of the society that gave rise to it—a society that worships modernism, consumer culture, and environmental degradation. In “Numbers,” Brocaw explores what it means when a life is endlessly quantified from birth to death “in some IBM file somewhere.” “In the Book” examines the veracity of our culture’s perceived knowledge that is accepted without debate. Yet Brocaw also has an eye for the serene: In “Beauty,” he expounds on the presence of the “unerasable face of god” that is all around us.

More than four decades later, the writings in See the Pretty Deer are no less relevant. These are poems that will stay with you long after the book is closed.