Opinion Forum

Writing the Way Home

December 20th, 2011

By Jan Barry Across America, a special gift is arriving at numerous homes this week. This gift is a new book by Warrior Writers titled After Action Review: A Collection of Writing and Artwork by Veterans of the Global War on Terror. What makes this book decidedly different from so many other gifts this holiday [...]

Articles written by Jan Barry
Tags: After Action Review, photos, poetry, PTSD, veterans, Warrior Writers
Categories: Arts, Life, Military | Comments (1) | Home

Happy Holidays

December 17th, 2011

By Jan Barry

Articles written by Jan Barry
Tags: Afghanistan, Combat Paper Project, Holidays, Iraq, veterans, Vietnam
Categories: Arts | Comments (9) | Home

From Making War to Book Making

October 28th, 2011

By Jan Barry Tearing a leaf from Edgar Allan Poe’s literary leave from the US Army, a similarly brash band of Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans called Warrior Writers is raising money from friends, family and fellow vets to publish a collection of their own poetry, prose and art drawn from military experience. Poe parted [...]

Articles written by Jan Barry
Tags: Afghanistan, anthology, Iraq, poetry, veterans, war, Warrior Writers
Categories: Arts, Life, Military | Comments (0) | 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

“We” Got Osama bin Laden?

May 4th, 2011

By Tom Carter Lots of Americans are happily shouting, “We got Osama bin Laden!” When I first heard it, I couldn’t help but ask myself, “What do you mean, ‘we’?” The fact is, the U.S. military and intelligence officers got him, under the leadership of their chains of command, including the Secretary of Defense, the [...]

Articles written by Tom Carter
Tags: Afghanistan, bin Laden, burden, Iraq, Marines, society, soldiers, veterans
Categories: Military, News, Politics | Comments (11) | 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 (19) | Home

Waging Poetry

January 5th, 2011

By Jan Barry When I get blue, beyond the soothing realms of jazz or mother Nature or love, I reach for a book of poetry. The rhythmic kick of well-placed words works better for me than pills or booze. So it was that I recently sat in a wintry funk and read W.D. Ehrhart’s latest [...]

Articles written by Jan Barry
Tags: healing, poetry, The Bodies Beneath the Table, veterans, W.D. Ehrhart, war
Categories: Arts, Life | Comments (2) | Home

Living with Death’s Shadow

December 23rd, 2010

By Jan Barry Holiday blues. Survivor guilt. Withering blasts of grief. Like so many war veterans, I’ve been living with these and other chronic nightmares most of my adult life. It often gets worse during holiday seasons and certain anniversaries. For many of us, this is an intensely private story that’s seldom talked about in [...]

Articles written by Jan Barry
Tags: grief, guilt, loss, poetry, PTSD, support groups, survivor, veterans, writing
Categories: Arts, Life, Military | Comments (4) | Home

Clocking the Cost of War

April 15th, 2010

By Jan Barry The cost of waging war overseas on the fumes of a sputtering national economy is stirring some unusual, creative protests. Mayor Matt Ryan of Binghamton, NY, is vowing to install a digital “cost of war” clock on the front of the municipal building to show local residents how much they pay in [...]

Articles written by Jan Barry
Tags: Afghanistan, Binghamton, cost, Iraq, militarism, taxes, veterans
Categories: Military, News, Politics | Comments (1) | Home

Agent Orange Update

April 8th, 2010

By Jan Barry For years, many Vietnam veterans in poor health were convinced that the disease that destroyed their life after the war had something to do with Agent Orange. I spent years as a journalist trying to help find answers to these haunting health questions. Now, three decades after trying to bury concerns about [...]

Articles written by Jan Barry
Tags: Agent Orange, defoliant, disease, herbicide, illness, Shinseki, veterans
Categories: History, Military, News, Politics | Comments (26) | Home

War Writing Retreat

March 11th, 2010

By Jan Barry Far from the televised spectacle of Olympic athletes whooping or weeping in joy or anguish in pursuit of split-second victories, some other highly dedicated young people quietly gathered to share strategies for coping with relentless physical and emotional turmoil—in this case, from participating in deliberately deadly international contests. The gathering of edgy [...]

Articles written by Jan Barry
Tags: art, poetry, retreat, veterans, workshop, writing
Categories: Life, Military, News | Comments (1) | Home

Ending War

November 24th, 2009

By Jan Barry Army Captain Paul K. Chappell attended West Point with an unusual goal, “determined to study war the way a doctor studies an illness.” What he found in his studies and in a war tour in Iraq was a pragmatic way of envisioning what it would take to create a cure for war [...]

Articles written by Jan Barry
Tags: Chappel, peace, veterans, war, West Point
Categories: History, Military, Politics | Comments (2) | Home

Veterans Campaign on Environmental Issues

November 17th, 2009

By Jan Barry After Army tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, Captain Mike Breen (photo at left) is on a new mission—seeking to convince fellow Americans that our addiction to fuel from Middle Eastern oil wells is a dire threat to our soldiers in combat and our security at home. Breen, a former infantry platoon leader, [...]

Articles written by Jan Barry
Tags: energy dependence, energy policy, environment, veterans
Categories: Military, News, Politics | Comments (1) | Home

Dying on the Home Front

November 10th, 2009

By Jan Barry An estimated 2,200 U.S. military veterans died last year because they lacked private health insurance or access to VA health care, a study by a Harvard Medical School research team found. In contrast, there were 155 combat deaths among U.S. troops in Afghanistan in 2008, the researchers noted. “On this Veterans Day [...]

Articles written by Jan Barry
Tags: deaths, health care reform, health insurance, VA, veterans
Categories: Military, News, Politics | Comments (3) | Home

The Duty of Dissent

October 11th, 2009

They teach a lot of things at the US Military Academy at West Point, but one thing they don’t teach is the honorable duty of dissent, a vital element in a democracy. I was reminded of that while reading a new book about the latest crop of veterans protesting military actions in Iraq and Afghanistan. [...]

Articles written by Jan Barry
Tags: Afghanistan, dissent, Iraq, soldiers, suicide, veterans, West Point
Categories: Military, Politics | Comments (14) | Home

Tackling War Trauma

June 3rd, 2009

How to handle traumatic war events has famously ranged from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address — exhorting survivors of fratricidal, in some cases suicidal Civil War battles to “resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain” — to General Patton slapping a soldier hospitalized for psychoneurosis, a term used in World War II for what [...]

Articles written by Jan Barry
Tags: PTSD, veterans
Categories: Military, News | Comments (2) | Home

Home for Veterans

May 9th, 2009

Coming home for some war veterans means slipping off the track of chasing a fading American dream. Despite the yellow ribbons of support for the troops festooning patriotic front yards and backs of cars, there’s an army of homeless former soldiers seeking shelter in cities and towns across this country. Compounding the shock of becoming [...]

Articles written by Jan Barry
Tags: homeless, PTSD, veterans
Categories: Military, Politics | Comments (5) | Home

Community Action on War Trauma

March 1st, 2009

Many communities in the United States have a hidden problem, one that is in grave need of the American tradition of neighbors helping neighbors. The problem is the burden of memories that many young men and women bring home from a war, which can often become harder to deal with as time goes by. Many [...]

Articles written by Jan Barry
Tags: PTSD, soldiers, veterans
Categories: Life, Military, News | Comments (2) | Home

Obama Snubs Heroes

January 24th, 2009

President Obama made a serious mistake on the day of his inauguration. He found time to attend ten inaugural balls, but he didn’t show up at the Salute to Heroes Inaugural Banquet & Ball. He was invited, of course, but Vice President Biden went instead and was warmly received. Among those who welcomed him were about [...]

Articles written by Tom Carter
Tags: Obama, veterans
Categories: Military, News, Politics | Comments (11) | Home

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