Other Publications

Winning Hearts and Minds: War Poems by Vietnam Veterans, 1st Casualty Press, 1972

Free Fire Zone: Short Stories by Vietnam Veterans, 1st Casualty Press 1973

Postmortem, Poems and Short Stories by Vietnam Veterans, 1st Casualty Press, 1973 (unpublished anthology)

“....Paquet was the the first to collect soldier poems from the Vietnam War, and among the first to note that these poems, unlike previous war poems, openly acknowledged the complicity of American soldiers in war’s atrocities….refused to present the soldier wholly as a victim of bad policy, as earlier poems had done.”

Lorrie Goldensohn, American War Poetry

“....the essence of poetry is vivid imagery and a compression of meaning. It would be difficult to put in one paragraph of prose the stories of an exploding mine, the desire to become a man, permanent sterility, the irony of war’s attraction, and a bitter longing for death. Yet…Paquet’s ‘Basket Case’ does all this, wrenching the reader into an awareness of the straddling set of associations between war, manhood, birth, and death.”

Nancy Anisfield, Vietnam Anthology.

“‘.…the publication of WHAM represented the epicentre of this emergence. However, the significance of Winning as a key work of moral witness to the war, the positive reception and substantial attention given to the anthology upon its release, and the enduring legacy it bequeathed, all belie the difficult beginnings of the book. An outgrowth of the burgeoning antiwar veterans' movement, the collection brought together a selection of poems gathered over four years by members of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW)...the poets in WHAM….actively engaged with the notion that soldiers could be morally responsible for and complicit in war. Not only was this a significant departure from earlier war poetry but….it also prefigured recent developments within moral philosophy with regard to understandings of soldier responsibility. Crucially, WHAM helped to turn English-language war poetry from primarily a poetry of victimhood into a poetry that acknowledged the potentially ambiguous role of soldiers in war.’”

Adam Gilbert, "And the fire still burns": Vietnam war poetry, moral witness, and Winning Hearts and Minds

“....Paquet constantly searches for new and interesting ways to synthesize his conflicting roles of “agent” and “victim” in Viet Nam.  While lesser writers seem to wallow in their guilt, he seeks to integrate these two ideas imagistically, portraying in his poetry the brutality, guilt, and complicity of the “agent” part of his psyche, as well as the outrage and defeatism of the “victim”....almost symbiotic relationship between these two roles, at times seeking an imagistic “gestalt” between his speakers and the suffering subjects that they interact with. In many instances, the two become unmistakably intertwined; their bodies (and representations thereof) interpenetrated and made one. This makes for odd war poetry, a poetry “grounded” in the most literal sense by the blood and guts of conflict, yet punctuated with moments of highly abstract psychic and spiritual connection.” 

Matthew B. Hill, America, Viet Nam and the Poetics of Guilt.

“....Paquet wants his readers to share his anguish at the deaths of men he tended as a medic—and he succeeds. Of all the writers in this collection, he seems most able to make his poetry recreate the uselessness of combat death, and his poems hurt.”

John Clark Pratt, Preface, Unaccustomed Mercy