Arts of War on the Web

Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam by Fredrik Logevall has just been named the winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for History.

Read John Prados’s review from the November/December 2012 print edition of The VVA Veteran. 

Two of the winners of this year’s prestigious National Book Critics Circle Awards—Robert Caro and Ben Fountain—are the authors of books that touch on the Vietnam War. Caro’s The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson,  which took the best biography award, is the fourth massive volume of Caro’s award-winning bio of LBJ. The book ends with Johnson taking over as President in November of 1963 and making his first momentous decisions about the Vietnam War.

Fountain’s novel, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, which won the NBCC prize for fiction, is a brilliant look at a squad of Iraq War veterans back home in the U.S. A. It contains many flashbacks to that war and a few pointed references to the war in Vietnam and veterans of that war.

For a book entitled Of Hearts and Minds; Body and Soul: America’s Disabled Combat Veterans: Forgotten Heroes of Vietnam, co-authors (and Vietnam veterans) John Brittain and Rick Bell would like hear from former service members who fit the title and subtitle who are willing  to tell their life stories.

“The Vietnam veteran is getting older and has been, over the years, the recipient of indifference and sometimes disrespect for his involvement in the war,” Brittain says. “Most Americans today when they hear of disabled veterans do not think to include our disabled Vietnam veterans.  Society today has more respect for their current armed forces than during the Vietnam era and present day society probably better understands how important our armed forces are [today].”

For more info, contact  Brittain at jbritt99@wavecable.com or 360-387-0792, or Bell at bellvista@frontier.com or 360-653-7420

Stanley Karnow, the journalist and author best known for Vietnam: A History, his massive 1983 book that won the Pulitzer Prize and was the basis for a 13-part PBS documentary of the same name, died January 26. He was 87 years old and had congestive heart failure.

Karnow covered the Vietnam War for Time magazine and The Washington Post beginning in 1959, well before the American war escalated.

Karnow was born in Brooklyn, and served in the Army Air Forces in World War II. He graduated from Harvard in 1947,  and then began his journalism career in France. In addition to Vietnam: A History, he other books included The U.S. and the Philippines: In Our Image and Mao, China: From Revolution to Revolution, and Paris in the Fifties, a memoir.  He was working on a second memoir when he died.

In the decades following the publication of Vietnam: A History, Karnow often spoke out about the Vietnam War. That included a conversation he had in 2009 with Gen. Stanley McChrystal, then the commander of U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

“He calls me and asks if there was anything I learned in Vietnam that we could use in Afghanistan,” Karnow told a reporter in 2010.

“Well, I didn’t have a long conversation with him, but I did say if we’re going to talk about Vietnam, what we really learned in Vietnam is that we shouldn’t have been there in the first place.”

The new Michael Connelly Harry Bosch detective thriller, The Black Box, which we reviewed (extreme positively) on our Books in Brief on the web page a few weeks ago, has become a big bestseller. The week after its pub date The Black Box was the No. 1 best-selling book on Publishers Weekly‘s Hardcover Fiction list.

As we noted in the review, The Black Echo, the first Harry Bosch novel, came out twenty years ago. The new book is the eighteenth in the series featuring Bosch, a quirky L.A. homicide detective who is a former Vietnam War tunnel rat.

Bosch’s Vietnam War experience was at the heart of the first book and his service in the war plays a role in all of the subsequent ones. That includes The Black Box, in which Harry obsessively investigates a twenty-year-old murder.

Scholastic, the big children’s book publisher, announced last week that Suzanne Collins, the author of the wildly successful “Hunger Games” trilogy, has written Year of the Jungle, a forty-page autobiographical picture book for young children that is based on the experiences of her father, a U.S. Air Force Vietnam veteran.

The book, Collins’s first since the last of dystopian “The Hunger Games” trilogy came out two years ago, will by published next September. The new book is aimed at children as young as four. James Proimos is the book’s illustrator.

Something like 50 million copies of the “Hunger Games” books are in print. The movie of same name—the first of four planned for the series—has grossed more than a half a billion dollars since it was released in March.

As for the new book, Collins said that she had been thinking about writing something based on her father’s Vietnam War tour and her reaction to it for several years.

“I had this little wicker basket next to my writing chair with the postcards my dad had sent me from Vietnam and photos of that year,” Collins said in a statement released by her publisher. “But I could never quite find a way into the story. It has elements that can be scary for the audience and it would be easy for the art to reinforce those. It could be really beautiful art but still be off-putting to a kid, which would defeat the point of doing the book.

“Then one day I was having lunch with Jim and telling him about the idea and he said, ‘That sounds fantastic.’ I looked at him and I had this flash of the story through his eyes, with his art. It was like being handed a key to a locked door. So, I just blurted out, ‘Do you want to do it?’ Fortunately he said ‘Yes.’”

Suzanne Collins

Robert McGowan, an artist and writer who served with the 9th Infantry Division in Vietnam in 1968-69, died November 15 after a long battle with Agent Orange-caused non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. He was 65 years old.

McGowan, known to his friends as Rob, also was a leader in the 1980s and 1990s effort to revitalize the South Main District of Memphis, where he lived and worked. In 1988, McGowan and his first wife Annie Mahaffey started the Memphis Center for Contemporary Art in the then run-down downtown neighborhood. The Center was next door to a store-front building the couple had bought in 1981 and renovated. The nonprofit Center featured the work of dozens of local and artists and ran video and performance art series, among other endeavors.

“South Main had been abandoned by the city, by developers, and by local lending institutions,” the South Main Association noted in September when McGowan received the Downtown Memphis Commission Visionary Award.

McGowan and Mahaffey “initiated the establishment of the South Main Historic District and founded the South Main Historic District Association, Memphis Center for Contemporary Art, Tennessee New Art Association, and the art publication NUMBER. Rob was a true urban pioneer who paid a great personal price for his interest and belief in preserving and revitalizing an urban environment. The South Main District we see and enjoy today is the result of his vision and hard work.”

In recent years McGowan concentrated on writing essays, novels, and short stories. That includes Nam, a compilation of war-related short stories, which was published earlier this. David Willson, in his review of the book on The VVA Veteran‘s Books in Brief on the web page, called the stories ” dazzling, harsh, funny, and truthful.”

Willson formed a close friendship with McGowan following the publication of Nam. “When I heard the news, I shed bitter tears for the loss of Rob, but tried to tell myself that the great life he’d led since Vietnam was more and better than the lives of tens of thousands who died in Vietnam or who were grievously wounded there,” Willson told us.

“Now I shed more bitter tears—for Rob, for me, and for all of those whose lives were shortened or taken by that unnecessary war. I miss Rob every day and feel his loss constantly, and I never even met him in the flesh, so powerful was the bond we forged as he went though his cancer treatments.  His humor and his great good spirits are with me still, even though he has gone away.”

You can read an illustrated article on McGowan’s artwork on the Memphis Magazine’s website.

Bill McCloud, a Vietnam veteran who teaches U.S. history at Rogers State University in Oklahoma, recently wrote an op ed in the Tulsa World on the extent of young people’s knowledge of the Vietnam War.

McCloud has a good feel for that subject. In 1987, when he was a junior high school teacher in Pryor, Oklahoma, the Army veteran conducted a survey to try to find out what his students knew about the war. (It wasn’t very much.)

That experience prompted McCloud to write letters to Vietnam veterans, former Vietnam War policymakers, historians, journalists, politicians, and others involved with the war asking them what they thought was the most important aspect of the war to teach young people.

He received a ton of replies from–among others–Presidents Nixon, Carter, Reagan, and George H.W. Bush, and from Vietnam War veteran writers Tim O’Brien, Larry Heinemann, John Clark Pratt, Philip Caputo, and The VVA Veteran‘s Arts Editor, Marc Leepson.

In 1989, McCloud put those responses in his book, What Should We Tell our Children About Vietnam? It makes for fascinating reading even today, twenty-five years after it was published by the University of Oklahoma Press.

Nelson DeMille, who served as a First Cavalry Division platoon commander in the Vietnam War, today is one of the nation’s most prolific best-selling novelists. Several of DeMille’s compulsively readable thrillers—including Medal of Honor (1985), The Charm School (1988), The General’s Daughter (1993) , and Up Country (2002)—deal directly with the Vietnam War and Vietnam veterans.

That’s not the case with DeMille’s latest book, The Panther (Grand Central, 640 pp., $27.99), which came out in mid-October and immediately headed to the top of the best-seller lists. In his new book, DeMille brings back wise-cracking former New York City cop John Corey, now working for the feds on fighting terrorism, and his wife, FBI agent Kate Mayfield. It’s 2004 and Corey and Mayfield are in Yemen going after the guy behind the USS Cole bombing, an Al Qaeda operative nicknamed “The Panther.”

“Corey ranks as one of the best protagonists in thriller fiction,” one reviewer wrote. “DeMille tells the tale in the first person so the reader can delve into the mind of the sarcastic and smart federal agent. He has the audacity and gumption to tell it straight, along with a wisecrack, and get away with it. Mayfield is the perfect sidekick, with the strength and stamina to not only fight for justice, but also put up with Corey’s antics. DeMille again proves that he has the master touch with The Panther, a suspenseful action free-for-all.”