The Ken Burns Effect
September 6, 2017 § Leave a comment
Marines marching in Da Nang, 1965. Associated Press, via PBS
Even after the passage of 50 years time, it is hard to imagine anyone except Ken Burns who would have dared to take on a documentary about the Vietnam War. Love him or hate him, he has stature and respect and a resumé that means that, if nothing else, he cannot be ignored. Already, before it has aired, partisans of the extremes of opinion the culture has carried for all this time, are condemning it for not doing what it has expressly set out not to do – bring the issue to resolution. « Read the rest of this entry »
Memorial Stories
May 29, 2017 § Leave a comment
Like the great majority of the American population, I have no one in my family who died in military service. Generations of my ancestors served in conflicts from the Civil War to World War II, but no one died in combat. Five years ago I knew only one man who had been killed in Vietnam. The grief of war was an abstract thing to me. I understood Memorial Day, meaning I knew the difference between it and Veterans Day and the Fourth of July, but it still felt like a day of observance that belonged to other people. « Read the rest of this entry »
Sick of Rambo
April 11, 2017 § 6 Comments
Fred, my writing mentor for The One-String Violin, was afraid of this. “You’ll get a young editor who will reject it because it doesn’t fit the stereotypes,” he said. I dismissed it. It is so time for a new look at everything to do with the war in Vietnam, I thought, and that will be self-evident and editors and agents will pick it up in relief. Isn’t everyone exhausted from the effort it takes to buy into that Rambo thing – man against the jungle and the bad guys (who are never us), blood and sweat, violence, snarls … ? « Read the rest of this entry »
Vietnam (War or Country) and Reiki
March 17, 2017 § Leave a comment
In honor of the recent opening of my new energy healing studio, I spent several hours trying to find a way to reorganize this blog site to keep Vietnam and Reiki separate. At first it was a technical problem. How could I describe, in google-terms, that I wanted to sub-divide my site so that if I posted something about Vietnam it would stay in the Vietnam box while a post about Reiki would stay in the Reiki box, neither visible to the other? No one else seemed to want to do that, though, which made me wonder why I did. « Read the rest of this entry »
The Book, Still
February 3, 2017 § 2 Comments
I wondered, in the months since the election, if events had outrun my book. The war I write about seems almost quaint today. What use can telling its story be to us now? No one wants to hear any more about it anyway, right? « Read the rest of this entry »
Shoes on the Ground
December 4, 2016 § Leave a comment
Maybe 4,000 veterans at Standing Rock, that’s what one of our Ithaca veterans estimates. Many of them invoke the oath they swore when they enlisted, “to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic;…” They did not forget that oath, or lose their skills, or dampen their hearts. They are now, as one veteran said, where they are meant to be. « Read the rest of this entry »
Activism Nostalgia
November 21, 2016 § Leave a comment
There was a reason for that slogan we had, “Never trust anyone over 30.” We were on to something. We believed the Vietnam War was wrong. We believed in civil rights and women’s rights. We believed we had to be better stewards of the earth. « Read the rest of this entry »
