Opinion Forum

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
Categories: Life, Military, Politics | Comments (0) | Home

Steve Mason: Writing His Way Home

June 8th, 2012

By Jan Barry When he died at age 65 in May 2005, Steve Mason’s obituary appeared in newspapers across America. Virtually all of them noted that Mason was “the poet laureate of the Vietnam Veterans of America whose searching blank verse was read at the dedication of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C.” That […]

Articles written by Jan Barry
Tags: memorial, poetry, Steve Mason, veteran, Vietnam
Categories: Arts, Life, Military | Comments (0) | Home

Vietnam and Afghanistan

March 1st, 2012

By Tom Carter This article was originally published in September 2009 — two and a half years ago. Unfortunately, it’s as relevant today as it was then. In late 1965, I was in Kontum, Vietnam as a pilot in a helicopter crew sent there for a few days to support U.S. Special Forces operations. I […]

Articles written by Tom Carter
Tags: Afghanistan, Bernard Fall, failure, Islam, Taliban, terrorism, Vietnam
Categories: History, Military, Politics | Comments (4) | 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

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