Opinion Forum

A Call to Action

September 19th, 2012

By Jan Barry Veterans For Peace held its 27th national convention last month in Miami, Florida. Among the highlights were a tribute to the organization by former TV talk-show host Phil Donahue and a call by novelist and poet Alice Walker for a new wave of outreach to enlist veterans on the verge of suicide […]

Articles written by Jan Barry
Tags: Alice Walker, Donahue, human rights, suicide, veterans, VFP, war
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Military Suicide Watch

September 9th, 2012

By Jan Barry What do you do when even war heroes can’t take it any more? A year after surviving a fierce battle in Afghanistan, Medal of Honor recipient Dakota Meyer put a pistol to his head and pulled the trigger. He was shocked that it didn’t fire, the highly decorated Marine wrote in a […]

Articles written by Jan Barry
Tags: Afghanistan, combat, Dakota Meyer, Iraq, suicide, veterans, war
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Dead or Alive: W.D. Ehrhart on War and Peace

September 1st, 2012

By Jan Barry We are the ones you sent to fight a war You didn’t know a thing about. Those of us who lived Have tried to tell you what went wrong… (from “A Relative Thing”) The expanding bookshelf of works by W.D. Ehrhart—20 books, at last count—started with a ticked off Marine who barely […]

Articles written by Jan Barry
Tags: books, literature, poetry, teacher, veterans, Vietnam, W.D. Ehrhart, war
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Combat Paper: On the Cutting Edge

August 5th, 2012

By Jan Barry Tina and Joe Drakulich are still haunted by the mural their son David painted during leave before returning to war. David’s painting of a sunset-glowing mountainside city rising amid a meadow filled with black crosses conveyed a stark premonition that he would not be coming home from his third combat deployment. The […]

Articles written by Jan Barry
Tags: combat art, Combat Paper, healing, poetry, PTSD, therapy, veterans
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Military Culture and Suicide

August 4th, 2012

By Jan Barry One of America’s biggest hidden tragedies is suicide. When I was growing up in the 1950s, it was a virtually forbidden topic. When I began working as a news reporter in the 1970s, I bumped into a tradition in journalism that suicides were not reported. When a Vietnam veteran in a small […]

Articles written by Jan Barry
Tags: Afghanistan, culture, Iraq, PTSD, soldiers, statistics, suicide, veterans
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