In 1969, when the U.S. Army tapped 19-year-old Dayl Wise to become a non-commissioned officer, he took flak from trainers for lacking a “command voice.” Couldn’t the lanky, soft-spoken kid from Westchester act like a tough guy, say John Wayne? Instead, Wise kept a voice that he knew by heart. “The toughest person I know is my mother,” says Wise. “Weighed about 100 pounds, Irish, you know. And she was tough—tough love—and so, secretly, I kind of channeled my mother. I was the nurturing sergeant. And I’d say things [to soldiers] like, “Did you change your socks today? Did you take your malaria pill?”
In Vietnam, Wise’s soldiers nicknamed him “Mother.” Now 77, he still dotes on his troops, working as a peer specialist and manager of writing and arts programs at the Hudson Valley National Center for Veterans Reintegration.
As part of Wise’s duties at the nonprofit organization, he emcees a monthly open mic—poems, essays, songs and sometimes comedy—every second Friday at the Center’s clubhouse-like headquarters in Saugerties, which has a large “Welcome Home” sign above its front doors. Framed front pages from newspapers, such as “GERMANY QUITS”—May 8, 1945, decorate the Center’s wood-paneled walls. Books to borrow include “Idiot’s Guide: Organizing Your Life” and “Home Improvement 1-2-3.” An art gallery currently displays prints using paper made from pulped military uniforms. And there’s a piano and a pool table.
A trim man with a bushy gray beard flecked with red, who wears a tan sports-jacket and jeans and walks with a limp, Wise runs the readings with boot camp efficiency; a five-minute break means five minutes. But he maintains a cheerful vibe. He urges guests to snack on the cheese, hummus and cut fruit and delivers between-reader updates about the then-scoreless Seattle Mariners-Detroit Tigers playoff game.
The readers use compact, plain-spoken language. Former Marine Walt Nygard’s poem, for instance, includes the line, “Waking to hate is no way to live.” Nygard ends his brief performance with a crisp salute to the audience of about 25 veterans and civilians. That mix pleases Wise. “That’s partly why I started this Veterans’ open mic,” he says. “I see someone talking to a veteran, and I’m thinking, ‘How cool is that?’ They’re talking about craft. They’re talking about poetry.”
Charlie Loomis, 75, later takes the mic. He wears a black jacket emblazoned with dog-tags and the words, “I am a Navy Veteran. I’ve been hated by many, loved by plenty.” He pays tribute to a soldier who died at Gettysburg on July 3, 1863 titled “The Last Time.” Loomis was inspired by a journal found by the soldier’s body. “They call this the civil war,” Loomis says, “But there isn’t anything civil about it.”
Loomis confides that he had been “down in the dumps as far as you can be” before joining Wise’s weekly writers’ group two-and-a-half years ago. He reckons he’s missed just three sessions. When he first read in public, his shaking hands betrayed his nervousness. Now, Loomis has a calm stage presence and credits the camaraderie fostered by Wise for his improved mood. “Dayl runs a tight ship,” Loomis says. “But it’s fun. He knows who to tease and who not to tease. It feels like a family. It is family.”
Towards the end of the roughly two-hour event, Wise shares one of his own poems about his 20th birthday, held in the field on May 6, 1970. It is a touching poem of longing for home, “Mother,” no longer a teen, yearning for mom, who would make him a frosted cake as well as “a stack of blueberry pancakes with real maple syrup—not that Aunt Jemima corn syrup shit.” His Vietnam birthday celebration proved grittier:
“No candle, but I did have my Zippo lighter.
My thumb struck the flint wheel, lighting the wick, creating the flame.
Closed my eyes. I made a wish
A wish not to get anyone killed or be killed
And blew the birthday flame out,
And my wish, it partially came true.”
A few days later, Wise sits in a comfortable-looking bentwood armchair at his Woodstock house, but the conversation becomes uncomfortable when a visitor requests that he recount, perhaps relive, how his tour in Vietnam ended. Wise was shot in a firefight requiring “five or six” surgeries on his left leg. A lift in his black sneaker makes up for the missing inch. Behind tortoiseshell glasses, Wise’s blue eyes look war weary. “It was an ambush,” he recalls. “It was dark. It lasted maybe 15, 20 seconds, maybe 30 seconds, along the Cambodian border.” The landing zone “seemed a pretty safe area, though.” But Wise admits that after six-months of combat, “I was getting a little lax. I was tired. I was done.”
Wise believes that he went into shock after being shot. “A person was attending to me. Still a lot of firing, and I was looking for my weapon, and I found the radio. And so, I started talking on the radio. And then someone took it from me.”
He remembers being carried on a stretcher and could make out a Quonset hut in the distance: “I can see the outline of it,” he says. When Wise talks, a visitor can almost imagine the fwap, fwap, fwap of chopper blades. After being evacuated, Wise saw “a blinding light. And I remember a nurse putting her hand on my chest. And I feel good. And then I, then I went unconscious.”
Like many veterans of the Vietnam Era, Wise struggled with the transition to civilian life. He would run into high school friends, but “they had no idea what to say to me; I had no idea what to say to them.” When fielding questions about the war, he repeated stock answers that he had heard from his father, who had served in World War II: “Weather sucked, man…Eating pork slices out of a can, cold. But the peaches were good!”
Wise also wrestles with his role in a war that he considers unjust. To avoid postwar confrontations, he sometimes fibbed about ownership of his olive-green field jacket with WISE on the chest. People commented, “’Oh, you’re in the Army.’ And I said, ‘No, it’s my brother’s field jacket.’ And I don’t have a brother.”
Vietnam-era veterans lacked opportunities for support or therapy. “There was nothing for us back then,” Wise laments. Nowadays, several nonprofit organizations, corporations and local governments, including Ulster County, provide assistance to veterans. Wise points out that his organization, which was founded in 2019, offers a passel of programs, including a kayak-building class, a dog-training course and recently launched improv lessons. Yet, veterans still have a suicide rate twice as high as civilians.
Wise “buried everything for decades” and, occasionally, his temper would flare. “It would come out at odd moments, my anger. I was married and divorced, and I had two children, and,once in a while, over a minor thing, like squeezing the toothpaste in the middle, I would over-react.”
While his legacy of trauma remains with him, Wise acknowledges that the military gave him a lot. “It’s not black and white,” he says of his service. The Army taught him discipline. Before being drafted, Wise lacked academic ambition and dropped out of college after one semester—“I just wanted to put gas in my car and meet girls.” After his discharge, Wise returned to college and became a draftsman and a civil engineer.
Wise also found ways to heal. He brought medical supplies to Vietnam three times starting in 1993, talked to students in New York City schools about the reality of warfare and started writing. And writing. His second wife, Alison Koffler, an accomplished poet and a longtime educator, encouraged Wise to “to write it out.” The couple co-founded Post Traumatic Press, which gives “voices to veterans and noncombatants whose lives have been affected by the trauma of war.”
Poetry has enabled Wise to command his voice. And he is profoundly grateful for the guidance of his wife. “Alison gave me this gift that no one ever has given me before,” says Wise. “No human being has ever given me this gift in which I can open up my box of demons and then I’m able to close it when I step away from my computer or my [writing] pad. Then I’m able to be around people.”
Who Goes There? is an occasional column about difference-makers in our community.
David Wallis has contributed to The New Yorker, Esquire and The Guardian, among other publications. He co-edited “Going for Broke: Living on the Edge in the World’s Richest Country” (Haymarket).