Kirjahaku

This work presents 42 essays, whose topics include not only the Gulf, Vietnam, and Korean wars, the conflict between Israel and Palestine, war and journalism, and American war poetry, but also junk mail, the Internet, the IRS, tugboats, drawbridges, race relations, and the justice system.

Twenty-three powerful, moving, angry and wise essays published over a period of 15 years on subjects ranging from South Africa to Central America, the United States to the Soviet Union, all bound together by the lingering physical, psychological, political and intellectual sensibilities the author first developed as a young enlisted Marine during the Vietnam war. Four of the essays deal with Ehrhart's second return to Vietnam in 1990.

A new collection of Bill Ehrhart's essays--25 of them, written between 2002 and 2012 on subjects ranging from the Vietnam War failures of American policy-makers to life in 21st century Vietnam; the trenches of the Western Front, the mountains of Korea, the sands of Iraq; from the value of one's name to the cowardice of Congress; mountain gorillas in Rwanda, the journalist Gloria Emerson, teaching poetry to teenagers; on the famous (Wilfred Owen) and the obscure (Robert James Elliott).... These essays explore the fallacies of history, the madness of war, the craft of poetry, the profession of teaching, and the art of living.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.