Arts of War on the Web

Lawrence “Butch” Morris, the acclaimed, pioneering jazz composer and conductor who served a tour of duty in the Vietnam War, died January 29 at the Fort Hamilton, N.Y., VA Medical Center. He was 65 and had lung cancer.

“Mr. Morris referred to his method as ‘ conduction,‘ short for ‘conducted improvisation,’” his New York Times obituary said. “He defined the word, which he trademarked, as ‘an improvised duet for ensemble and conductor.’”

“I wanted to hear 25 people play like a jazz trio,” Morris said in a 2008 interview with Farai Chideya of NPR’s News and Notes. “I wanted it to have that kind of combustion and spontaneity and momentum and ignition, and I started thinking about conducting.”

Morris was born in Long Beach, California, and grew up in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. He began playing trumpet in high school.  He served as an Army medic in German, Vietnam, and Japan, beginning in 1966.  He began his musical career in earnest back home in Los Angeles, paying cornet in Horace Tapscott’s jazz band.  Morris studied music at Grove Street College in Oakland, California, and later played and taught music in France and Holland. He moved to New York in 1981.

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.”

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.

Robert J. Manning, a long-time newspaper reporter and magazine editor, died September 28 at age 92.  Manning, who served in the U.S. Army during World War II, was the editor of  The Atlantic Monthly from 1966-1980.

“After a breaking-in period as executive editor, he became the 10th editor in chief of the ­Atlantic, in 1966. The magazine nearly doubled its circulation during his tenure and became a leading critic of US involvement in Indochina,” Robert Feeney wrote in his obituary on Manning in the Boston Globe.

“He instituted the ‘Reports and Comments’ section, and among writers whose careers he furthered were Elizabeth Drew, James Fallows, Ward Just, James Alan McPherson, L.E. Sissman, Ross Terrill, [Vietnam veteran] Tracy Kidder, and Dan Wakefield.”

After leaving The Atlantic, Manning became the editor in chief of Boston Publishing where  in the mid 1980s, he oversaw the publication of “The Vietnam Experience,” an illustrated, 25-volume series of large-format books that looked at many aspects of the Vietnam War. The series, which concentrated on the military history aspects of the war, was distributed by Time-Life Books.

Malcolm W. Browne, the former Associated Press and New York Times Vietnam War correspondent best known for taking a much-reproduced 1963 photograph of a Buddhist monk immolating himself  on the streets of Saigon, died August 27 at age 81 of complications of Parkinson’s disease.

Iver Peterson, a retired New York Times reporter and former Vietnam War correspondent,  died August 1 following treatment for acute myelogenic leukemia. He was 70 years old.

After graduating from Harvard in 1964, Peterson went to work for The Times as a clerk for the famed correspondent James B. “Scotty” Reston in the Washington, D.C., bureau. Peterson then left journalism to work for U.S. AID in Vietnam. He returned to The Times in the war zone to cover the fighting.

He “was one of a generation of young reporters who earned distinction as war correspondents in Vietnam,” Daniel E. Slotnik wrote in his NYT obituary. “Besides his dispatches from combat zones, Mr. Peterson wrote of an American dump scavenged by two Vietnamese villages near Danang; drug use by American soldiers; and the practice by Cambodian soldiers of wearing amulets to ward off bullets.”

John Keegan, the prolific and renowned British military historian, died Aug. 2 in his home in England at age 78. Keegan wrote two dozen books of military history, many of which dealt with various aspects of World War II. But he also wrote about the American Civil War, the Iraq War, Agincourt, Waterloo, and World War I.  His 1993 work, A History of Warfare, is considered a classic of its genre.

Keegan taught at the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst (England’s  West Point) from 1960-85. He then went to work for the London Telegraph as its defense correspondent. His last book, The American Civil War, was published in 2009.

Paul Fussell, the acclaimed literary scholar and World War II veteran best known for his pioneering book The Great War and Modern Memory (1976), died May 23. Fussell, who was severely wounded in France in 1944, died of natural causes at age 88.

The Great War in Modern Memory, which received the National Book Award, was listed as  No. 75 on the Modern Library’s list of the greatest nonfiction books of the 20th century. In it, Fussell examines  World War I through the cultural lens of how it was perceived during and after the fighting. His explication of the vast differences between romanticized versions of the war after it was over and the shocking brutality of the actual war itself strongly influenced how historians and other scholars have studied all wars, including the Vietnam War.

“It is difficult to underestimate Fussell’s influence,” Vincent B. Sherry wrote in The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the First World War. “The book’s ambition and popularity move interpretation of the war from a relatively minor literary and historical specialization to a much more widespread cultural concern. His claims for the meaning of the war are profound and far-reaching; indeed, some have found them hyperbolic. Yet, whether in spite of or because of the enormity of his assertions, Fussell has set the agenda for most of the criticism that has followed him.”

Paul Fussell Jr. grew up in Pasadena, Calif., and was drafted into the Army in 1943 while he was a student at Pomona College. He missed D-Day, but 2o-year-old Lt. Fussell experienced the war at its worst. He served as  a 7th Army rifle platoon leader in southwestern France from November 1944 until six months later when Fussell was wounded as many of his men lay dying around him. He never got over it.

Fussell wrote two books about his World War II service, The Boys’ Crusade: The American Infantry in Northwestern Europe, 1944-45 (2003), and Doing Battle: The Making of a Skeptic (1996). The journalist Russell Baker called the latter “a wonderfully angry” book. In it, Fussell describes how he was wrenched from an ideal childhood and young adulthood into the Army and into the maw of war in France.

Fussell witnessed the horror of war up close. That experience, along with his brief post-war time in the Army, shaped the rest of Fussell’s life. It led him, among other things, to persue a life of the mind as a college English professor, prolific essayist, and world traveler.

In the book Fussell provides many insights into the Human Condition, primarily in relation to society and politics in the United States following World War II. Fussell also reprises one theme of The Great War in Modern Memory as he describes how he tried to come to grips with why war is romanticized by those who did not do the fighting and dying.

Horst Faas, one of the top photojournalists who covered the Vietnam War, died May 10 in Munich, Germany. He was 79. Faas served as the Associated Press’s chief of photo operations in Saigon from 1962-72. Under his leadership, AP photographers took some of the most riveting and lasting images of the war.

That included Nick Ut’s famed Pulitzer-Prize winning 1972 photo of the young Vietnamese girl burned by napalm, and Eddie Adams’ shot of the ARVN Gen. Loan shooting a Viet Cong suspect in the head on the streets of Saigon during Tet 1968.

Eddie Adams, Faas later wrote, “loved young Nick Ut, whose brother, Huynh Cong La (Thanh My), had died photographing for the AP in 1965. And he admired the art and sensitivity of [the French photographer] Henri Huet, whom he helped to bring over to The AP from UPI in 1965.

“It was these two great photographers and close friends who made me feel like a lottery winner twice over again when I edited their film: Henri Huet with his moving sequence of a wounded medic aiding others wounded in battle (1967) and, of course, Nick Ut and his ‘napalm girl,’ Kim Phuc, in 1972.

“Henri died in 1971 in the flames of a helicopter. Eddie Adams, Henri Huet and Nick Ut wrote our history with perfect, singular newsphotos.”

The German-born Faas himself received the Pulitzer for his Vietnam War coverage, as well as the Overseas Press Club’s Robert Capa Award and other honors. ”I don’t think anyone stayed longer [in Vietnam], took more risks or showed greater devotion to his work and his colleagues,” the late Vietnam War correspondent and author David Halberstam said of Faas. “I think of him as nothing less than a genius.”

The acclaimed journalist and novelist Bill Granger died April 22 at the Manteno Veterans Home in Illinois. Granger, 70, who served in the U.S. Army from 1963-65, died of heart failure.

Granger  was born in Wisconsin Rapids, Wisc., and grew up on Chicago’s South Side. He graduated from DePaul University with a BA in English in 1963, and then spent two years in the U.S. Army. During his military service in Washington, D.C., Granger worked part time as a copy boy at The Washington Post. After his honorable discharge, Granger was a reporter for the Chicago Tribune and later a columnist and editor at the Chicago Sun-Times.

Granger’s first novel, November Man, a thriller, was published in 1979. He went on to write a total of twenty-five mysteries and thrillers, most set in Chicago, under his own name and the pseudonyms Joe Gash and Bill Griffith. Granger and his wife Lori also co-wrote three nonfiction books.