A former United States poet laureate, Simic won the Pulitzer Prize for his 1989 collection, The World Doesn’t End. He teaches writing at the University of New Hampshire, and spoke to me by phone.

Charles Simic: Like anyone my age, war has always been part of my life. I was born in 1938 and was three years old when the bombs started falling on my hometown of Belgrade. When the city was liberated in October 1944, I was six, living in the center of the city. My parents always being busy with—well, who knows what they were busy with—we kids used to just run in the street. And we saw a lot of stuff. Stuff young children are not supposed to see. Including, you know, dead people.

There is a story told in my family that I remember only vaguely. I came home wearing a trooper’s helmet on my head. This was after the Russians had liberated the city. There was a church nearby where I lived, and I went in the churchyard and inside there were some dead Germans. The helmet had fallen off, kind of to the side. I remember distinctly that I did not look at him in the face—that was too scary. But I took the helmet. The reason the story is repeated in my family is not because of what I did—that I took it off a dead German. More awful things than that happened during the Second World War. They told the story because I got lice from the helmet, and they had to shave my head.

When I first got to the United States, I was 16, and as soon as I arrived people started telling me—“Oh, Charlie, you’re going to Korea!” But I didn’t, of course. I was too young, but there was always that fear. I remember working for the Chicago Sun-Times when I was young—a lowly job, going in in the morning into what was called the composing room, where they put together the paper on Saturday mornings. I was in a pretty good mood because it I’d gotten paid the night before. One of the workers yelled out to me, “Hey, Simic, you’re going to Lebanon!” They were sending Marines there at the time. It scared me—ruined my day. I thought, “I don’t want to go to Lebanon!” On and on, for the rest of my life. I was in the army before Vietnam, then my brother was in Vietnam, and then the first Gulf War and my son thought that he would be in that ...

As you know, we no longer see carnage from our wars. But during the Vietnam War, if you stayed up late at night—which I did in those days, certainly—and turned on the TV around 11 o’ clock or midnight, they would show documentary footage of the war. They were really graphic pictures that are just impossible to forget. Dead Vietnamese. Machine-gunning dead Vietnamese from a helicopter, or our soldiers lying dead or wounded. Vietnam was the last war where you could see those things, and they learned their lesson. This is sort of the context for my interest in this poem.

I don’t read it that often, but every time I read “A Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Gray and Dim,” I sort of choke up. I tried to read it to a class this fall and found myself being immensely, immensely moved by it—even though I know the poem very well and knew what was coming.