Tag: Gloria Emerson

Why Did All Those People Die?

W. D. Ehrhart, The Madness of It All: Essays on War, Literature, and American Life [2002] This is a collection of the Vietnam veteran and poet’s prose pieces up till 9.11.  Some are quite short…

Citizens

A Singer In 1969 or 1970, I began to re-evaluate my whole concept of what I wanted my music to say…. I was very much affected by letters my brother was sending me from Vietnam,…

Wartime during Life/3

We Expect the Germans To know their own historyTo tell the truth about their warTo refuse rationalizations and excusesTo act responsibly here and nowHowever many decadesAgo that was The world expects the AmericansTo know their…

Compañeras

I needed to find other women who knew what I knew, and more. I needed to talk to women who had seen unspeakable things, who were without self-pity, who had faced the liars and lunatics,…

McNamara and Co./2

I’d chain all of the politicians to that haunting Vietnam memorial and have them read—slowly—every name aloud. Then the war would end for me. Take all of them, all of them who gave us the…

Dear Isabel (Letter/2)

Sunday 21 June 2015 Dear Isabel Page 2, paragraph 1 About your “fear of rejection”:  Do you have a “fear of attraction” as well?  I wonder how many people fell in love with you in…

“Every Man Should Have His war”

One of the best books I’ve ever read is by Gloria Emerson, Winners and Losers: Battles, Retreats, Gains, Losses and Ruins from a Long War. A major themes in the book is how the Vietnam War affected Americans (or…

Deep Seeing

Dear Chris, For me, one of  Thich Nhat Hanh’s greatest gifts is the original 14 precepts of the Order of Interbeing (first published by Parallax in 1987).  As you know, I include the 4th precept…

Respecting the Vietnamese

On John Balaban’s Remembering Heaven’s Face: A Moral Witness in Vietnam For Chris, Carol, and Cristina John Balaban declared himself a Conscientious Objector during the VietnamWar; he ended up going to Vietnam, but as a member…