Arts of War on the Web

C.D.B. Bryan, the journalist and author best known for his best-selling 1976 book, Friendly Fire, the story of the death in Vietnam in 1970 of infantryman Michael Mullen by an errant U.S. artillery round, died of cancer December 15 at his home in Guilford, Connecticut. He was 73.

Bryan had a long and fruitful writing career. He will be remembered, though, for his contribution to the Vietnam War nonfiction literary canon for his powerfully told story of Michael Mullen’s death in Vietnam and its aftermath. The book began as a New Yorker article, and then was the basis for a 1979 Emmy-Award-winning TV movie starring Carol Burnett (below) as Michael Mullen’s mother Peg, who later became a prominent antiwar activist.

Peg Mullen died Oct. 2. She was 92 years old.

The new documentary, The Philosopher Kings, looks at the lives of a eight custodians who work at several universities, including Cornell, Princeton, Duke, and Cal Tech. “The idea was to seek wisdom from those we consider to be on the fringes of society and to point out that intelligence is not exclusive to classrooms, professors, or those we normally attribute to be the wise people in our culture,” said director and co-producer Patrick Shen. “We set out to tell their stories, to bring humanity and dignity to people we don’t normally see.”

The two custodians in the film from Cornell, Jim Evener and Gary Napieracz, are close friends and also are Vietnam veterans. Both come off very well in the film. “They asked me what was the most important or dramatic part of my life, and I said, ‘My parents dying . . . and Vietnam,’” Napieracz told the Cornell University Alumni magazine. “We started talking about the war and I said, ‘Let me tell you, I’m not the perfect person to be interviewed about Vietnam. I have a good friend who’s a hero in my eyes.’”

That would be Evener, who has a prominent role in the film, talking about his life, including his Army service in Vietnam, where he was severely wounded on a resupply mission. “It was like somebody poked you with a punch, between that and an electric shock,” Evener said. “I didn’t go flying over any logs or through the air like you see on TV.” Evener wound up crawling through the jungle for three days before he was rescued.

The film had its debut in June at the Silverdocs Film Festival in Silver Spring, Maryland, and has been on the documentary circuit in festivals, at churches, museums and universities since then here, in Canada and in England. It’s also available on DVD. You can see a trailer at the Cornell U. Alumni magazine page or find out more and order a copy at the film’s website.

December 15 is the deadline for proposal submissions for presentations for this year’s Popular Culture and American Culture Association Conference, which will be held March 31-April 3 at the Renaissance Grand Hotel in St. Louis–and which also has a Vietnam War component.

All approaches and points of view—creative, scholarly, interdisciplinary, multicultural—are welcome in the areas of Vietnam War film, literature, history, sociology, political science, linguistics, ethnicity, folklore, original fiction, poetry, drama, art, music, and Vietnamese writers and artists and culture.  Or “whatever interests you about the war and its genesis or aftermath,” Mary Sue Ply, who coordinates the PCA/ACA Vietnam War activities, told us.

The rules: Send a 250-word abstract (including title) for a paper or for a complete panel. For each presenter, include name, department and university affiliation (where appropriate), mailing address, phone number, and e-mail address.

Write to Mary Sue Ply, Department of English, Southeastern Louisiana University, SLU 10861, Hammond, LA 70466; call 985-549-3383; or email mply@selu.ed

Matthew Alexander, a former military interrogator and a Iraq War veteran, is conducting research on interrogation methods at American University in Washington, D.C., and is writing an unofficial interrogation manual to supplement the Army Field Manual. He would like to interview former military interrogators from any of America’s wars, including Vietnam. Part of his work is to collect true stories from interrogators and the methods they used.

So, if you are a former military interrogator or intelligence officer who conducted interrogations, he would like to hear from you. Contact his research assistant, Jennifer Anderson, at 757-243-4319 or email her at jennifer.anderson@american.edu And tell her your read about the project in VVA’s Arts of War on the Web.

Back in the late seventies or early eighties when I was working as a journalist in Washington, D.C., I covered a press conference in which the famed radical activist lawyer William Kunstler was a featured performer. I use the word “performer” advisedly because that was my impression of the guy in person: He was putting on a show, and a show that was more or less about William Kunstler. He postured and preened and showed a generally high regard for himself. I have no recollection of what cause the press conference was promoting, just an image of a sixties icon in the flesh.

That performance left me with a low regard for the man who was most famous for being the lead counsel in the bombastic Chicago Seven trial, in which a group of radical antiwar activists (Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, et al.) were accused of inciting a riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

My feelings about Kunstler, strangely enough, were shared to a degree by his two youngest daughters, Emily and Sarah Kunstler (above), the offspring of his second marriage—the one that came after he left his first wife and children and his run-of-the-mill law practice to wade hip deep into left-wing legal activism.

The girls were born in 1976 and 1978, when their father was 57 and 59 years old. As young girls, they idolized their father; but as they grew up, their opinion of their flamboyant, media-hungry father changed, mainly because of his penchant for “defending bad people,” alleged rapists, terrorists, and organized crime figures.

“At some point, Emily Kunstler says, “he stopped standing for anything.”

The two women do an excellent job telling their father’s life story (he died in 1994) in William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe, a documentary that Sarah Kunstler wrote and that she and her sister produced and directed. We get the details of William K’s life, including his service in the Pacific as an Army officer in World War II during which he was awarded the Bronze Star. The film,naturally enough, focuses on his work in the sixties and seventies when he became a nationally known figure.

It’s a personal film and it works on that level—the story of two bright, accomplished young women coming to terms with their famous father’s conflicted legacy.