Innocence and Loss

Rezensionen / Stimmen

"Nearly a hundred years after the war to end all wars, there is no one left alive to remember the travesty that was that war, but we do have the writings of Wilfred Owen to describe the horrors of trench warfare and the suffocating death that gas brought. Historians have been trying to rewrite the Vietnam War since the last helicopter fled that roof top in Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City, but Vietnam veteran poets like Jan Barry have published works that force us to look deep into our nation's soul at war. These writings that challenge the state's dominant narrative about war are critical to the survival of democracy. If not for these writings and the crucial work of war journalists and scholars, we would only know the tall tales of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Nixon, Kissinger, and all the other war makers who never personally fight wars. I was able to tell my stories from Iraq because I had the help of veterans and supportive academics without whom I may well have just gone home and tried to forget the war. But the reality is that there is no forgetting war. War forever changes you and the only way to find the new you is to tell those stories, to write them, to sign them, to get them out there so that others may understand some of what you have gone through. The works in this book reflect an effort to add more voices where they are desperately needed."-Geoff Millard, Iraq Combat Veteran; Organizer and policy expert on Veteran Homelessness"Delving into this history, this probing collection of essays explores ways in which 'the compulsive redeployment of innocence' in the launching, cheering and retelling of America's wars 'endlessly defers a national reckoning,' as the editors astutely state in their introduction. ... At long last, a determinedly dissenting side of American culture is emerging on war issues. Essays in this collection explore some of the seeds of that long evolution."-Jan Barry, US Army Veteran of Vietnam; Advisor to the Warrior Writers and Combat Paper Projects; Professor of Journalism at Ramapo College of New Jersey and St. Thomas Aquinas College