On the Bookshelf by Nancee Cline
In the mid 90’s two friends came over for dinner. Mike and Beryl were easy friends and our evening was a casual gathering. When I served Mike at the table, however, he became visibly upset. He did not say one word during the entire dinner, but stared at his plate.
“It's the rice,” Beryl explained later. “You served him rice. When he was in Vietnam he swore he would never eat rice again.”
The war had been over for more than 20 years. Although this is a fact, it is not necessarily true for those who fought it.
Healing the emotional wounds of those surviving war can be a long, painful, and frightening journey. Editor Maxine Hong Kingston started a writer’s workshop for vets in 1993 to help them in the healing process. The participants found that as they explored their memories by story or poem, life got a little better. The group grew and bonded; they understood and accepted each other. They shared their suffering, their regret, and eventually, their fragile hope. Some of the vets became novelists, editors, journalists or poets, and one makes documentaries.
Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace, is a collection of their best work, sometimes first published elsewhere, often winning awards. Last year on Veteran's Day, Borders invited local authors to read aloud from this anthology. It was a powerful hour to listen and remember, to feel both gratitude and sorrow. Now it is Memorial Day and the book is calling out to me again.
Who are the writers? Vietnam medics and Gulf War bombers, aircraft maintenance officers, third generation military men, war widows, vets from the Viet Cong, Afghanistan, Korea and Israel.
What do they write about? Usually about one specific incident, one individual person, a moment of awareness. An Israeli teenager writes about her fear of the mandatory service she must begin on her 18th birthday. One writes about his aversion to noise since the Vietnam War, and how he designs his life around quietness. One remembers his estrangement from his father as they held incompatible beliefs about the Vietnam War—and how now they are close again. A daughter writes about “finding her heart” after a military childhood of fear. Some write about the painful realization that war is not glorious. Some write about their loss of faith, and the years spent trying to find it again. The North Vietnam vets share what life was like on the other side, living with starvation, desolation. A marine writes about a VC woman who diffuses American bombs, but carries in her rucksack her beloved Hemingway books.
Pauline Laurent, widowed as she awaited the birth of her first child, never gets over the sorrow. After joining the writers group, healing finally begins. She shares that “writing was the container that could hold my grief. The blank page wanted to hear every last detail.”
Le minh Khue served on the Youth Volunteer Brigades on the Ho Chi Minh Trails. Later she became a war correspondent. She explains, “War knocks at every door. I tried to avoid it but I couldn't.”
Many write about nature, the one place where they experience real peace. Birds, butterflies, cranes, flowers, beaches, the sunlight on water, the color of snow, the quiet of trees.
Is it depressing? No, but it is often sad. A couple of pieces show anger, but the writing is not about venting. It is about telling the truth so the author can make peace. And peace is the goal for the vets. Whether they volunteered for the service or were drafted; whether they were proud to fight, or became conscientious objectors; whether they killed people or patched them up; whether they buried their sweethearts, or comforted them through years of nightmares, they all have an insatiable hunger for peace.
I read the stories and listen as hard as I can. What about this story needs to be told? What is the writer asking for? Not to change the past. They want their experience to be taken seriously. They want their sacrifice to be recognized. They want the country to know the enormity of suffering inflicted on both sides.
Joe Lamb wants the public to realize that war is absolute insanity. He says that those leading us into war suffer from a fundamental disconnect from reality. If you stripped away the pomp and ceremony, he says, the leaders were like the men in the psych ward where he worked. “The grandiosity, the paranoia, the belief in global conspiracies, all this was uncomfortably similar to the delusions of the guy on Stelazine who thought he was controlling Neil Armstrong by beaming radio beams directly to the moon from his head.”
Michael Little wants to end the classic prevailing fallacy that we must honor the dead by continuing to die.
Collectively, they ask the reader: Listen.
Let me tell my truth. Let me risk and survive the
telling. Do not offer me patriotic clichés. Do not
try to fix me, or shush me, or explain me. Do
not hurry me or interrupt me. Don't pretend you
know how I feel. Hear me. If you really listen,
your heart and soul will hold my reality, feel its
weight.
Reading the stories is a way of honoring our veterans. Their pleas for peace are not casual, trendy, popular, or sentimental. These vets are making their secret scars visible and allowing the public the privilege of witnessing it.
Historically this is an important book.
Certainly it sheds light on the wars we fight
today. It sheds light on the whole history of
war. It sheds light on the human psyche. It is a
testament to the words the truth shall set us
free.
CLICK HERE FOR MAY 2007 BOOK REVIEW: WHY I AM A missional + evangelical + post/protestant + liberal/conservative + mystical/poetic + biblical + charismatic/contemplative + fundamentalist/calvinist + anabaptist/anglican + methodist + catholic + green + incarnational + depressedyet-hopeful + emergent + unfinished CHRISTIAN by Brian McLaren
CLICK HERE FOR APRIL 2007 BOOK REVIEW: The Colonyesus by John Tayman
CLICK HERE FOR MARCH 2007 BOOK REVIEW: Christianity for the Rest of Us by Diana Bass
CLICK HERE FOR FEBRUARY 2007 BOOK REVIEW:Dreams from My Father, A Story of Race and Inheritance by Barack Obama
CLICK HERE FOR JANUARY 2007 BOOK REVIEW: Summary for 2007
CLICK HERE FOR DECEMBER 2006 BOOK REVIEW: The Dream of God by Verna J. Dozier
CLICK HERE FOR NOVEMBER 2006 BOOK REVIEW: Pastwatch, the Redemtion of Christopher Columbus by Orson Scoot Card
CLICK HERE FOR OCTOBER 2006 BOOK REVIEW: Small Wonder by Barbara Kingsolver
CLICK HERE FOR SEPTEMBER 2006 BOOK REVIEW:The Chosen by Chaim Potok
CLICK HERE FOR AUGUST 2006 BOOK REVIEW: LIrrestible Revolution, living as an ordinary radical: by Shane Claiborne
CLICK HERE FOR JULY 2006 BOOK REVIEW: The Piano Shop on the Left Bank, by Thad Carhart; Zen and the Art of Archery by Eugen Herrigel; Saturday, by Ian McEwan; Gift From the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindberg
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