Arts of War on the Web

The Journal of Military Experience, which just put out its first on-line volume, publishes short stories, creative nonfiction, poems, and artwork by veterans of all eras, as well as those by family members of veterans, care providers, and scholars interested in, as the editors put it, “educating the masses about military culture.”

This nonprofit venture considers every creative work that is submitted. “Instead of accepting or rejecting creative works outright,” the editors say, “we review them all, giving each author a chance to make corrections, develop ideas, and craft narratives that are cathartic but also powerful when read.” A team of volunteer editors does all the proofing and editing, working with those who submit their prose, poetry and art work.

For submission guidelines, go to http://militaryexperience.org/submissions And, if you submit, please mention that you read about the journal on Vietnam Veterans of America’s Arts of War on the Web page.

Thanhha Lai, who was born in Vietnam and moved to this country in 1975, received the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature last night, November 16, at the annual awards ceremonies in New York.

Lai was honored for her first book, Inside Out & Back Again (Harper, 272 pp., $15.99), a series of autobiographical free-verse poems aimed at children in grades four to eight. The story-poems deal with the saga of a ten-year-old Vietnamese girl who flees Saigon with her family as the communists take over in 1975 and goes on to face immense adjustment problems in the United States.

VVA life member Guy Anhorn, who did a 1968-69 Vietnam War tour, has put together a high-quality DVD documentary, Painted Warriors: Rangers on the DMZ, which tells the story of the Ranger teams of P Company of the Army’s 75th Rangers, who were a part of the Fifth Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade in northern I Corps.

Relying heavily on recent interviews with thirteen former Papa Company Rangers, as well as old photos and war footage, the documentary focuses on the six-man long-range patrol Hunter Killer Teams, which had the distinction of being the northern-most Ranger unit that operated during the Vietnam War.

The two-hour DVD is available on line through Amazon.com and TheVeteransMuseum.com 

There’s a really good laudatory review in The Daily Beast of Karl (Matterhorn) Marlantes’ new book, What It Is Like to Go to War by Anthony Swofford, the Persian Gulf War Marine veteran who wrote the best-selling book Jarhead (2005). In his review, Swofford—who served in a Surveillance and Target Acquisition/Scout-Sniper platoon and has taught  at the University of Iowa and at Lewis and Clark College—also praises Matterhorn, as well two other Vietnam War novels by veterans of that conflict.

Here’s an excerpt:

“Over 40 years after he’d fought in Vietnam as a Marine Corps lieutenant, Karl Marlantes’s brilliant novel  Matterhorn arrived on the literary scene in 2010 like an acre of Claymore mines detonating at once. The evocative book instantly joined Tim O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato, Richard Currey’s Fatal Light, and other classics of the form up on the top shelf of war fiction. Many people asked, ‘What took this guy so long?’

Atlantic Monthly Press has announced that it will send a copy of Vietnam veteran Karl Marlantes’ new nonfiction book, What It Is Like to Go to War, to every member of Congress—as well as to President Obama, his cabinet, and to all the Republican presidential candidates—as a kind of Veterans Day gift.

“I believe this is one of the most important books on war ever written,” Atlantic Monthly President and CEO Morton Entrekin wrote in a letter that will be sent with each book. “Karl’s book will exhilarate you as you read about the deep bonds between soldiers and the heroism and sacrifice warriors make, and it will move you to tears as you feel the anguish soldiers experience when over taking life and watching comrades maimed and killed. Finally, it will, I hope, move you to action to as you read about the years of struggle veterans endure trying to come home.”

The book has been extremely well reviewed since its September publication. “The passion and self-revealing pain of ‘What It Is Like’ make it a must-read for anyone interested in that now long-ago war, the men who fought it, and the country that, in its confusion and political turmoil, treated many of those soldiers shabbily,” Tony Perry wrote in The Los Angeles Times review

The book “is less a memoir than an intellectual analysis in which Marlantes grapples with the complex and disconcerting moral questions involved in fighting and killing,” Jennifer Miller, writing in The Christian Science Monitor, said. “What he has replicated isn’t war, but rather the constant mental churning that follows and a quest to recover from man’s impulses in deadly situations.”

The book was the lead review in The VVA Veteran‘s September/October issue’s “Books in Review” column. In that review we noted: “It is a well crafted and forcefully argued work of nonfiction that contains fresh and important insights into what it’s like to be in a war and what it does to the human psyche. At heart, the book is a from-the-gut psychological and philosophical meditation on what happens to human beings in combat and afterward. In delivering those insights, Marlantes recreates his own wartime experience and his subsequent decades of emotional difficulties.”

Vietnam in HD is the name of a three-part, six-hour documentary that begins tonight, Tuesday, November 8, at 9:00 Eastern time on the History Channel. Much of the in-country Vietnam War footage in the series was shot by American troops. The voices of veterans’ first-person testimony are those of participants, as well as those of some Hollywood actors.
We’ll catch the first episode tonight and give a fuller review later in the week.

Citrus College history professor Bruce Solheim’s new play, “Bronze Star,” based on the life of his friend, Vietnam veteran Carl Ferguson, an Army draftee who received a Bronze Star and who committed suicide in 2002, will be one of the plays  showcased on November 8, 9, and 10 at 8:00 p.m. at the Hough Performing Arts Center at Citrus College in Glendora, California. The staged reading is part of the “Emerging American Voices: Stories for the 21st Century” series.

“We use some of our veteran students as actors and others as behind-the-scenes technicians,” Solheim told us. “The play touches on many contemporary issues while taking us back to the Vietnam War era.”

The play he said, deals with the Vietnam War, as well as today’s wars inIraqandAfghanistan. “It’s about a heroic, young, gay soldier looking for acceptance, peace, love, and purpose who is traumatized by war and rejected by his family and an uncaring and intolerant society.”

For ticket info, call the box office at 626-963-9411.

Tom Keith, a radio voice over actor and acclaimed sound-effects man best known for his decades of work on the Minnesota Public Radio show A Prairie Home Companion, died October 30 of a heart attack near his home in Woodbury, Minnesota. He was 64 years old and had served in the U.S. Marines Corps from 1965-69.

Keith, a native Minnesotan, played football, baseball, and basketball at Sibley High School in St. Paul, where he also was student council president. He played baseball for one year at the University of Minnesota, then joined the Marine Corps, serving for four years of stateside duty. Keith returned to college and graduated from Minnesota with a degree in speech and broadcasting in 1972. He then starting working nights at MPR, where he began to do sound effects. By the time of his death, Keith was one of the most creative sound effects experts on the radio.

“Whenever Tom came onstage,  I could see the audience’s heads turn in his direction,” A Prairie Home Companion founder Garrison Keillor said. “They could hear me, but they wanted to see Tom, same as you’d watch any magician. Boys watched him closely to see how he did the shotgun volleys, the singing walrus, the siren, the helicopter, the water drips. His effects were graceful, precise, understated, like the man himself.”

Keith “was one of radio’s great clowns,” Keillor said. “He was serious about silliness and worked hard to get a moo exactly right and the cluck, too, and the woof. His whinny was amazing — noble, vulnerable, articulate. He did bagpipes, helicopters, mortars, common drunks, caribou … garbage trucks backing up, handsaws and hammers, and a beautiful vocalization of a man falling from a great height into piranha-infested waters.”

The many on-line tributes to Tom Keith includes a page on Minnesota Public Radio with audio and video clips.

Former CIA Director William Colby, who played a significant role in U.S. Vietnam War policy-making, was founded dead in 1996, eight days after going missing on a solo canoe trip near his Maryland home. The new documentary, The Man Nobody Knew, produced by the spymaster’s son Carl Colby, looks at the odd circumstances surrounding his father’s death, as well as his long career in intelligence.

The Vietnam War played a central role in William Colby’s life and work. The World War II OSS agent first went to Vietnam in 1956 as a young CIA agent. He was CIA station chief in Saigon from 1959-62, was deputy director of the CORDS program in 1968, and—most famously (or infamously)—ran the controversial Phoenix program in 1969.  Colby headed the CIA’s Far East Division until he was named CIA director in 1973, a position he held until retiring in November of 1976.

In his 1989 book, Lost Victory: A First-Hand Account of America’s Sixteen-Year Involvement in the Vietnam War, Colby argued that the way to defeat the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese in Vietnam was not to send in large numbers of U.S. troops, but to help make the government of South Vietnam responsive to the needs of its people, thereby making the government an attractive alternative to the communists.

Among those interviewed in the film are former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, the journalists Seymour Hersh (who broke the My Lai story) and Bob Woodward, and former Defense Secretaries Robert Gates and Donald Rumsfeld.

“In some ways, The Man Nobody Knew is a quintessential Washington spook story,” Michael O’Sullivan said in his Washington Post review of the film, “told by a globe-trotting CIA brat who thought, for the longest time, that his father worked for the State Department.”