Opinion Forum

Vietnam: Another Kind of Adventure

August 23rd, 2011

By Jan Barry W.D. Ehrhart has been turning the tragedy of the Vietnam war inside-out, upside-down and sideways in a whirlwind of memoirs, articles, poems, poetry anthologies and travel pieces since surviving the battle of Hue in 1968—and living to ponder what the hell all the death, destruction and desperate encounters in Indochina added up [...]

Articles written by Jan Barry
Tags: DMZ, Ehrhart, Hanoi, Hue, Japan, Marines, Takenaga, Vietnam, war
Categories: History, Life, Military | Comments (2) | Home

Welcome Home

August 10th, 2011

By Jan Barry Bob and Moe Eaton’s marriage, shadowed for more than 30 years by nightmares from the war in Vietnam, was about to implode. Ken Kraft, an Army officer who proudly served in Iraq, felt betrayed by his son’s refusal to carry on the family tradition of military service. Eli Painted Crow, a former [...]

Articles written by Jan Barry
Tags: Afghanistan, film, Iraq, Oregon, PTSD, The Welcome, veterans, Vietnam
Categories: Arts, Military, News | Comments (0) | Home

Poetry and Cannons

August 7th, 2011

By Jan Barry The last time cannons were fired in battle at Governors Island in New York harbor was in 1776. After a long run as an Army and then Coast Guard headquarters, the ancient forts and cannon, 19th century officers quarters and rows of barracks were given over a few years ago to New [...]

Articles written by Jan Barry
Tags: Bowery Poetry, festival, Governors Island, poetry, veterans, Warrior Writers
Categories: Arts, Military, News | Comments (0) | Home

Uncle Sam’s Dioxin Cover-Up

July 19th, 2011

By Jan Barry Vietnam and New Jersey, despite the vast distance between them, share a deadly link. Both places, lushly beautiful this time of year, were poisoned by United States government actions regarding one of the most toxic chemicals, dioxin. In Vietnam, dioxin was widely spread as a contaminant in forest-killing Agent Orange herbicides that [...]

Articles written by Jan Barry
Tags: Agent Orange, dioxin, EPA, Ford, HBO, Mann, New Jersey, pollution, toxic
Categories: News, Politics, Science | Comments (0) | Home

Toxic Trails

July 15th, 2011

By Jan Barry Residents of a once-isolated mountain community in Ringwood, NJ have a bone-chilling tale to tell the rest of America. And HBO is offering its cable television services to help convey this story via a new documentary called Mann v. Ford. Highlighting the community’s fight against a plague of illness and deaths they [...]

Articles written by Jan Barry
Tags: cancer, children, deaths, EPA, Ford, lawsuit, New Jersey, superfund, toxic
Categories: Media, News, Politics, Science | Comments (0) | Home

Sailing for Peace

July 6th, 2011

By Jan Barry Beyond the July 4th fireworks celebrating historic battles against the British empire, American history includes many other memorable moments when courageous acts of conscience stirred the nation to steer a peaceful tack against the winds of war. One of those moments was in the spring of 1958 when a retired Navy captain, [...]

Articles written by Jan Barry
Tags: activists, anti-nuclear, Bigelow, Golden Rule, peace, Veterans for Peace
Categories: History, News, Politics | Comments (0) | Home

Eyes of Babylon in New York

June 17th, 2011

By Jan Barry Jeff Key took the long road—via Iraq, a ditch in Texas and many other way stations across America—to perform on a New York stage. Key is currently presenting a slice of his own life as a gay Marine in his one-man show, “The Eyes of Babylon,” at 59E59 Theaters. Reviewers have stretched [...]

Articles written by Jan Barry
Tags: Afghanistan, don't ask don't tell, gay, Iraq, Jeff Key, Marine, New York, play
Categories: Arts, Life, Military | Comments (0) | Home

A Lasting Lesson in Courage

June 14th, 2011

By Jan Barry In the spring of 1961, as I impatiently awaited graduation from high school, the news of the world was a blur to me. Unless there was a war zone or rumor of war involved, I paid little attention. So I don’t recall being aware of one of the big events of the [...]

Articles written by Jan Barry
Tags: freedom riders, Montgomery, PBS, race, Selma, Vietnam, voting rights
Categories: Life, Military, Politics | Comments (1) | Home

“Poster Girl” Draws Crowd

June 10th, 2011

By Jan Barry “Poster Girl,” the 2011 Oscar-nominated documentary, drew a standing-room-only crowd of more than 100 people in a recent showing at the Puffin Cultural Forum in Teaneck, NJ. The June 1 event also included a discussion with director Sara Nesson and Robynn Murray, the Iraq war veteran whose story is the focus of [...]

Articles written by Jan Barry
Tags: documentary, Iraq, Oscar, PTSD, Robynn Murray, Sara Nesson, VA, veteran
Categories: Life, Military, News | Comments (2) | Home

After Memorial Day

June 5th, 2011

By Jan Barry What do Americans do the day after Memorial Day? Move on, mostly, into the swing of summer, the resumption of daily routines uninterrupted by badgering advertisements for holiday sales and blaring reminders to commemorate the war dead. So the crowd was sparse the day after Memorial Day at the Veterans’ Voices poetry [...]

Articles written by Jan Barry
Tags: Afghanistan, Iraq, Memorial Day, Murray, poetry, PTSD, veteran, Wright
Categories: Life, Military, News, Politics | Comments (1) | Home

Vietnam GI Challenged War Makers

June 1st, 2011

By Jan Barry One of the most outlandish protests of the war in Vietnam, in the eyes of minders of military tradition, was a small independent newspaper, “Vietnam GI,” published by Jeff Sharlet, a feisty veteran of the early secretive stage of the conflict. With a top secret clearance and training in translating Vietnamese, Sharlet [...]

Articles written by Jan Barry
Tags: anti-war, FBI, GI, Jeff Sharlet, newspaper, underground, Vietnam, VVAW
Categories: Media, Military, Politics | Comments (1) | Home

Environmental Writing 2011

May 27th, 2011

By Jan Barry From Agent Orange’s insidious grasp out of the past of the war in Vietnam to current health concerns of many residents of Ramapo River communities, to the potential future effects of global climate change, 11 student-reporters at Ramapo College of New Jersey dug into a wide array of ecological issues in the [...]

Articles written by Jan Barry
Tags: Agent Orange, climate change, Earth, environment, projects, students
Categories: Education, News, Science | Comments (0) | Home

Rethinking National Security at the Pentagon

May 11th, 2011

By Jan Barry “Sustainability” is the latest buzz word in academic and environmental circles. Now it is also buzzing around the halls of the Pentagon. As the long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan run out of rationalizations and public patience, two staff officers working for the Joint Chiefs of Staff have developed a new twist [...]

Articles written by Jan Barry
Tags: Afghanistan, defense, foreign policy, Iraq, security, strategy, sustainability
Categories: Military, News, Politics | Comments (1) | Home

Counting Up the Costs of War

March 28th, 2011

By Jan Barry How many ways need it be said? America is going broke—and has become imperious, callous and cruel—waging wars around the world. A group of concerned citizens in New Jersey and New York set out recently to visually convey the costs of war for our nation. The result is a mind-boggling array of [...]

Articles written by Jan Barry
Tags: Afghanistan, costs, dead, financial, Iraq, photos, Vietnam, war, wounded
Categories: Arts, Military, News, Politics | Comments (1) | Home

At the Movies: A Veteran’s War

March 3rd, 2011

By Jan Barry It was a long way from a machinegun mount in a military convoy in Baghdad. Robynn Murray’s getup was very elegant on Sunday at the Academy Awards in Beverly Hills, California. What made her stand out from the famous movie stars at Hollywood’s gala event was the brace of tattooed pistols perched [...]

Articles written by Jan Barry
Tags: documentary, Iraq, Oscar, Poster Girl, PTSD, Robynn Murray, VA
Categories: Life, Military, News | Comments (2) | Home

The Latest Farewell to Fighting Wars in Asia

February 28th, 2011

By Jan Barry “Any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should ‘have his head examined,’ as General [Douglas] MacArthur so delicately put it.” There’s a quote for the history books, broadcast last week at the US Military [...]

Articles written by Jan Barry
Tags: Afghanistan, Asia, defense secretary, Gates, Iraq, Middle East, USMA, war
Categories: Military, News, Politics | Comments (1) | Home

Egypt’s Path to Peace

February 16th, 2011

By Jan Barry Not since the ancient Israelites slipped out on the Pharaoh in a famous dash through the Red Sea has a mass movement of people in that corner of the world so confounded the powers that be. “The young Egyptian protesters who overthrew the Mubarak regime on Saturday have accomplished what two generations [...]

Articles written by Jan Barry
Tags: democracy, Egypt, internet, islamist, peace, protests, revolution, violence
Categories: News, Politics | Comments (6) | Home

Nuclear Legacies

January 27th, 2011

By Jan Barry We may all be alive today thanks to two far-sighted women who died within days of each other this month. Imagine how many people would be living, if any, had the US-Soviet nuclear arms race exploded into World War III. Half a century ago, when the threat of such a war loomed [...]

Articles written by Jan Barry
Tags: cancer, Cold War, fallout, nuclear weapons, Reiss, research, treaty, Wilson
Categories: History, News, Politics | Comments (1) | Home

American-Made Mayhem

January 20th, 2011

By Jan Barry The good people of Tucson, Arizona are still reeling from the massacre in a shopping mall a few days ago that killed six public-spirited citizens and wounded 13 other folks including a popular congresswoman. Horrendous and heartbreaking as it was, it was just the latest outbreak of a peculiar American ritual. Given [...]

Articles written by Jan Barry
Tags: Arizona, Earth Songs, handguns, New Jersey, post office, shooting, violence
Categories: Arts, Life, Politics | Comments (1) | Home

Agent Orange’s Toxic Legacy Hits Home

January 13th, 2011

By Jan Barry Retired Master Sergeant LeRoy Foster is haunted by the job that launched his 20-year career in the US Air Force—spraying herbicides along perimeter fences and fuel pipelines at Andersen Air Force Base in Guam. This duty seemed inconsequential, field maintenance work done amid B-52 bombers thundering in and out to refuel for [...]

Articles written by Jan Barry
Tags: Agent Orange, birth defects, contamination, disease, Guam, VA, veterans
Categories: Military, News, Politics, Science | Comments (20) | Home