W.D. Ehrhart in Conversation

W.D. Ehrhart in Conversation
Author: Jean-Jacques Malo
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 237
Release: 2017-08-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 1476630046

W. D. Ehrhart, named by Studs Terkel as "the poet of the Vietnam War," has written and lectured on a wide variety of topics and has been a preeminent voice on the Vietnam War for decades. Revered in academia, he has been the subject of many master's theses, doctoral dissertations, journals and books for which he was interviewed. Yet only two major interviews have been published to date. This complete collection of unpublished interviews from 1991 through 2016 presents Ehrhart's developing views on a range of subjects over three decades.

Ordinary Lives

Ordinary Lives
Author: William Daniel Ehrhart
Publisher: Temple University Press
Total Pages: 356
Release: 1999
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9781566396745

In 1993, Ehrhart began what became a five-year search for the men of his platoon. Who were these men alongside whom he trained? Why had they joined the Marines at a time when being sent to war was almost a certainty? What do they think of the war and of the country that sent them to fight it? What does the Corps mean to them? What Ehrhart learned offers an extraordinary window into the complexities of the Vietnam Generation and the United States of America then and now.

Vietnam-Perkasie

Vietnam-Perkasie
Author: W.D. Ehrhart
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 485
Release: 2016-01-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 0786487577

In 1982, John Newman, curator of the Vietnam War Literature Collection at Colorado State University, said of W.D. Ehrhart: "As a poet and editor, Bill Ehrhart is clearly one of the major figures in Vietnam War literature." This autobiographical account of the war, the author's first extended prose work, demonstrates Ehrhart's abilities as a writer of prose as well. Vietnam-Perkasie is grim, comical, disturbing, and accurate. The presentation is novelistic--truly, a "page-turner"--but the events are all real, the atmosphere intensely evocative.

Waging Peace in Vietnam

Waging Peace in Vietnam
Author: Ron Carver
Publisher: New Village Press
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2019-09-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 1613321074

How American soldiers opposed and resisted the war in Vietnam While mainstream narratives of the Vietnam War all but marginalize anti-war activity of soldiers, opposition and resistance from within the three branches of the military made a real difference to the course of America’s engagement in Vietnam. By 1968, every major peace march in the United States was led by active duty GIs and Vietnam War veterans. By 1970, thousands of active duty soldiers and marines were marching in protest in US cities. Hundreds of soldiers and marines in Vietnam were refusing to fight; tens of thousands were deserting to Canada, France and Sweden. Eventually the US Armed Forces were no longer able to sustain large-scale offensive operations and ceased to be effective. Yet this history is largely unknown and has been glossed over in much of the written and visual remembrances produced in recent years. Waging Peace in Vietnam shows how the GI movement unfolded, from the numerous anti-war coffee houses springing up outside military bases, to the hundreds of GI newspapers giving an independent voice to active soldiers, to the stockade revolts and the strikes and near-mutinies on naval vessels and in the air force. The book presents first-hand accounts, oral histories, and a wealth of underground newspapers, posters, flyers, and photographs documenting the actions of GIs and veterans who took part in the resistance. In addition, the book features fourteen original essays by leading scholars and activists. Notable contributors include Vietnam War scholar and author, Christian Appy, and Mme Nguyen Thi Binh, who played a major role in the Paris Peace Accord. The book originates from the exhibition Waging Peace, which has been shown in Vietnam and the University of Notre Dame, and will be touring the eastern United States in conjunction with book launches in Boston, Amherst, and New York.

Busted

Busted
Author: W.D. Ehrhart
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 174
Release: 2021-04-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 1476642982

This book picks up where Passing Time: A Vietnam Veteran Against the War left off, and completes the trilogy begun with Vietnam-Perkasie: A Combat Marine Memoir. It begins with the Coast Guard raid on Ehrhart's oil tanker and ends with the conclusion of his trial for possession of "controlled substances," a span of time that corresponds almost exactly with the opening of the House Judiciary Committee's hearings on the impeachment of Richard Nixon and Nixon's resignation and pardon by Gerald Ford. Along the way, Ehrhart encounters a wise and sympathetic lawyer, an MG Midget, a local New Jersey cop who thinks he's Wyatt Earp, New York City detectives who arrest him for armed robbery of a liquor store, a forklift that can turn on a dime, a Coast Guard prosecutor who wants to teach Ehrhart a lesson, the Carranza Memorial, and three ghosts who are as real as you and me.

Thank You for Your Service

Thank You for Your Service
Author: W.D. Ehrhart
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 311
Release: 2019-03-01
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1476678537

Fifty-five years in the writing, these are the collected poems of W.D. Ehrhart, one of the major figures in Vietnam War literature. Arranged chronologically, it allows readers to trace the development of a writer whose talents are bound together by the lingering physical, psychological, political and intellectual sensibilities the author first developed as a young enlisted Marine during the Vietnam War. And while many of the poems deal with the author's encounter with the Vietnam War and its endless consequences, the poems range widely in content from family and friends to nature and the environment to the blessings and absurdities of the human condition.

How White Men Won the Culture Wars

How White Men Won the Culture Wars
Author: Joseph Darda
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 277
Release: 2021-05-25
Genre: History
ISBN: 0520381459

CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title, 2022 A cultural history of how white men exploited the image of the Vietnam veteran to roll back civil rights and restake their claim on the nation “If war among the whites brought peace and liberty to the blacks,” Frederick Douglass asked in 1875, peering into the nation’s future, “what will peace among the whites bring?” The answer then and now, after civil war and civil rights: a white reunion disguised as a veterans’ reunion. How White Men Won the Culture Wars shows how a broad contingent of white men––conservative and liberal, hawk and dove, vet and nonvet––transformed the Vietnam War into a staging ground for a post–civil rights white racial reconciliation. Conservatives could celebrate white vets as raceless embodiments of the nation. Liberals could treat them as minoritized heroes whose voices must be heard. Erasing Americans of color, Southeast Asians, and women from the war, white men with stories of vets on their mind could agree, after civil rights and feminism, that they had suffered and deserved more. From the POW/MIA and veterans’ mental health movements to Rambo and “Born in the U.S.A.,” they remade their racial identities for an age of color blindness and multiculturalism in the image of the Vietnam vet. No one wins in a culture war—except, Joseph Darda argues, white men dressed in army green.

What We Can and Can't Afford

What We Can and Can't Afford
Author: W.D. Ehrhart
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 243
Release: 2023-04-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 1476649898

Bill Ehrhart's experiences in the Vietnam War have defined his life--first as an enlisted member of a Marine infantry battalion, then as an author, poet and teacher who has spent fifty years explicating the war and its consequences in books, lectures and interviews. In these essays he explores a diverse range of topics. They include gun violence and the Second Amendment, American politics and the accelerating destruction of civil society, Afghanistan and other foreign policy misadventures, Israel and Palestine, the nature of patriotism, history as fact and mythology, the blessings of technology, the vast mystery of the universe, the attraction of Grand Tour bicycle racing, the much misunderstood writer Stephen Crane, poets you should know about but probably don't. And more.

Passing Time

Passing Time
Author: W.D. Ehrhart
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2022-11-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 1476647933

From 1969 to 1974 Ehrhart was just passing time. His reentry into the "world" began with his enrollment as a 21-year-old freshman (and token Vietnam vet) at Swarthmore College. At first simply trying to bury his past, Ehrhart slowly came to understand what happened to him, and why, in Vietnam. Interspersed are flashbacks to the war itself. It is the story of political--and personal--awakening. As the war dragged on, the United States' deceitful involvement and its perpetuation of fallacies and lies about the war's conduct forced Ehrhart to confront his own feelings about his government, country and self. Throughout, the reader shares with Ehrhart his odyssey through naivete, growing awareness, angry withdrawal and, finally, a measure of peace.