Greenbelt Green Man Festival

On May 11-12 we participated in the 9th Annual Green Man Festival in historic Old Greenbelt, Maryland. This Washington suburb was settled in 1937 as a public cooperative community. Eleanor Roosevelt helped in its planning.  The town was originally surrounded by a belt of 800 acres of forest, much of which was used for development. In 2003 the city designated the remaining 225 acres a forest preserve.

Green Man

The 9th Annual Green Man Festival is a celebration of Greenbelt’s commitment to preserve its acres of forests and to extend the urban tree canopy by planting more native fruiting trees.We enjoyed introducing people to our novels as they wandered past stalls offering  jewelry, tie-dyed clothing, pottery, photographs, paintings,beads, handcrafted bags, hats, crafts made from Tagua nuts, children’s books, food,  and booths of  environmental awareness and social justice organizations.

Praying Mantis & Friends

From the stage came acoustic folk music, a capella singing, Gaelic music, and marvelous jazz from Susan Jones Jazz Quartet—violin-guitar-bass-drums.

Happy Purchaser

There was a Maypole dance, a parade of people dressed as trees and bushes, and children with strangely-painted faces. Rain threatened on Saturday, but Sunday was splendid.

College Park. Saturday afternoon, I slipped away for a few hours to give a presentation and sign books at the 1st Annual College Park Library Book Fair, another well-attended event.

At the International Day of the Book festival in Kensington, Maryland, last Sunday, a steady stream of booklovers passed by. Many stopped to hear about Cologne No. 10 for Men and Well Considered. This is always our first book festival of the season. There were prose readings, poetry readings, a good band and other music (occasionally interrupted by trains roaring by on the adjacent tracks), food, and lots of books of every genre, both new and used. Hurrah and warm thanks go to Elisenda Sola-Sole at the Kensington Row Bookshop http://www.kensingtonrowbookshop.com/ for organizing it. Now we look forward to the rest of the spring season:

5/5/13 – Riverdale Park (MD) Artfest Literary Corner – Riverdale Park Town Center, Queensbury Road @ Marc Train Station – 11:00 am – 6 pm

5/11/13 – 1st Annual College Park Book Festival – College Park United Methodist Church at Corner of Rhode Island Ave. & Hollywood Road, College Park, MD – 2:00 pm to 4:00 pm

(Yes, we’ll be at both! See above and below)

5/11/13 & 5/12/13 – Greenbelt Green Man Festival – http://greenbeltgreenmanfestival.org/. Roosevelt Center in Historic Greenbelt. Saturday 10:00 am to 7:00 pm; Sunday 11:00 am to 6 pm

5/18/13 – Gaithersburg Book Festival – http://gaithersburgbookfestival.org/. Grounds of City Hall in Olde Town Gaithersburg. Saturday 10:00 am to 6 pm

5/22/13 – Book Expo – Bowie Senior Center, Bowie, MD. 9:30 am to 12/12:30

5/27/13 – Memorial Day Writers Project – Washington, D.C. on the mall near the Wall

6/1/13 – Bowiefest – Allen Pond in Bowie, MD – 11:00 am to 6 pm

*["Terminal Vibrato: Vibrato (oscillation) added to the end of a sustained musical note, whether played or sung, to give it life..."].

As if I didn’t have stacks of books awaiting my attention, yesterday I committed to two more: Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America by Juan Gonzalez, and Howard Zinn’s A History of the People of the United States. There was a good turnout at Busboys and Poets in Hyattsville for the first meeting of the Busboys Book Club http://www.busboysandpoets.com/blog/busboys-book-club. Luckily I have already read the Zinn book once, and we will be discussing only one chapter each month along with our main book selection. Also, chapter one of Zinn’s history seems a good supplement to Harvest of Empire. The participants were an enthusiastic group who had come  from as far as thirty miles away, and artist and book-lover-in-chief Andy Shallal, owner of the BB&P restaurants, led the meeting to get the club off to a good start, along with staffers Bill and Laila. The club will concentrate on books related to social justice, a theme that includes my two novels. It was a particular pleasure to speak with the person next to me who had already read Well Considered and had discovered it in the Hyattsville Busboys Bookstore.  I enjoyed meeting all these readers,  and we look forward to this monthly discussion. The picture above is from the Busboys and Poets Facebook page.

Calvin Tuttle says:
March 15, 2013 at 5:55 am

I would have thought that even the author of a novel about the Vietnam War would be somewhat better in touch with the reality vs. the myth of the times. As Vietnam veteran and associate professor of sociology at Holy Cross College Jerry Lembcke has persuasively pointed out through extensive research in his extremely well written work The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam, there is absolutely no documentation whatsoever to back up that tired cliche which he uses that soldiers who had returned from Vietnam were spat upon by supposed deranged hippie chicks.

Kill Anything that moves is as important a contribution to vast Vietnam War record as any ever published. Extremely well written, Turse takes a story hard to hear and offers a book hard to put down.

The research and documentation are unparalleled in my experience and he makes a decades old account compelling in our present circumstance of war without end. Kill Anything That Moves is a Must Read!
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Blogpost
Whether or not there is evidence of actual spitting*, the Vietnam veteran returned to a country where, even if he was able to talk about his war experience, nobody (hippie chick or mainstream citizen) wanted to hear it. The now ever-present “Thank you for your service” was missing from the American vocabulary. “Thank you for your service” has now become a standard phrase. It can be spoken by the enthusiastic military hawk or by those whose underlying feelings are “I am against this war but I want to separate my disdain for the war from my feelings about the warrior” or even “Thank you for going so that I didn’t have to do it myself.” The thank-you covers much ground and allows one to respectfully bring a conversation to a close. I use it to honor the person who made the sacrifices, while at the same time I oppose wars that we continually enter under false pretenses and execute with absurdities such as Nick Turse describes in his nonfiction and I describe in my fictitious Cologne No. 10 for Men, and that inevitably kill countless innocent civilians.

*Chicago Tribune staffer Bob Greene received over 1000 letters from veterans, many of which recounted specific details of being spat upon (while others reported receiving good treatment): see Homecoming: When the Soldiers Returned from Vietnam (1990)

Kill Anything That Moves – The Real American War in Vietnam, by Nick Turse

Nick Turse’s meticulously-researched investigations of American war crimes in Vietnam have gained him a Ridenhour Prize for Reportorial Distinction, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a fellowship at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. His bestselling work, Kill Anything That Moves, has been honored by an impressive list of publications, Vietnam War authors, organizations, and critics. Here is my take on it as a Vietnam veteran, combat infantry platoon leader, and author of Cologne No. 10 For Men, which Writers Digest calls “a superb novel of the Vietnam War.”

Turse’s premise is that the official U.S. Government strategy was to beat the South Vietnamese opposition into submission by warring against the civilian population, a policy of government-approved atrocities and cover-ups and of increasing kill counts by killing and counting civilians. “America implemented a system of destruction that turned rural zones into killing fields and made war crimes all but inevitable.”  It employed “search-and-destroy operations, free-fire zones, and the application of massive firepower” and “widespread bombing and shelling of civilian hamlets in ‘free-fire’ zones, the forced evacuations of peasants from their homes, and general failure to provide for the safety and care of civilians.”

He supports his argument “by combining veterans’ testimonies, contemporaneous press coverage, Vietnamese eyewitness accounts, long-classified official studies, and the military’s own formal investigations into the many hundreds of atrocity cases that it knew about…” and with eighty-five pages of end notes.

Prisoners being treated humanely at Rockpile near Bong Son in Binh Dinh Province by A Co. 2/5 1st Air Cavalry Division, Sept. 1967 (from my personal collection)

In my novel Cologne No. 10 For Men (2007), I blast with satire most of the same tactics and strategies that Turse attacks: the use of body counts and kill ratios to measure success against the enemy (also see my song, “Counting Bodies in the Nam” under Skytroopers lyrics http://richardmorrisauthor.wordpress.com/skytroopers/lyrics/, or hear it at http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/richardmorris), search and destroy tactics (changed to “search and clear” in 1967), infantry units calling in artillery fire on civilian areas when they receive enemy fire, free-fire zones where all occupants are considered enemies who can be killed, H&I Fires—harassment and interdiction (fired at no one in particular)—and the “rule” allowing U.S. soldiers to kill anyone who is running away.

But has Turse gone too far with his accusations? He claims that atrocities were ubiquitous in Vietnam but his source material covers only eleven of the forty-four Vietnam provinces.  He states, “While we have only fragmentary evidence about the full extent of civilian suffering in South Vietnam, enough similar accounts exist so that roughly the same story could have been told in a chapter about Binh Dinh Province in the mid-1960s, Kien Hoa Provine in the late 1960s, or Quang Tri Province in the early 1970s, among others.” This is weak.

He reports that atrocities caused two million civilian deaths (according to the Vietnamese government) or 195,000 (according to the U.S. Department of Defense) and were mostly from air attack—B52 bombers, jet fighters, helicopters, naval guns, tanks, mortars, and artillery. To me, the credible number is between these two. (While I consider these to be atrocities, many people would not; they consider atrocities to be face-to-face savagery like occurred in My Lai.)

But his biggest failure is that he provides no reports from soldiers and military units that did not commit atrocities; he tars all U.S. soldiers with the same shameful brush. He ignores those who fought courageously, did their jobs, and committed no crimes, and the 58,000 U.S. troops who were killed by North Vietnamese and Viet Cong soldiers and the agony and suffering they experienced. How many hundreds of thousands of American G.I.s did their duty without committing atrocities? Turse did not answer that. And if atrocities were so common, why were there only 300 allegations of such deeds in the secret Pentagon Vietnam War Crimes Working Group files that he examined, and why did those files detail “the deaths of [only] 137 civilians in mass killings,” a third as many murders as Chicago experiences every year.

In 1967, I personally served in a unit that committed no atrocities. I was an infantry rifle platoon leader with the 1^st Air Cavalry Division. I attended Infantry Officer Candidate School at Ft. Benning, Georgia, where besides receiving military training, we were taught humane treatment of civilians and prisoners under the Geneva Convention. In Vietnam, my platoon patrolled mountain jungles and surrounded hamlets searching for enemy soldiers. But we never burned a house or killed or wounded a baby, woman or old person. Neither did anyone in my company, nor to my knowledge, my battalion. I believe that our restraint was a result of proper command control. We did not “kill anything that moves” and never received that order. Our leaders required us to treat civilians and prisoners humanely.

And when we killed enemy soldiers, we always were required to show the bodies and captured weapons to our superior officers for them to verify that the remains were Viet Cong or NVA soldiers and not civilians (my novel Cologne No. 10 For Men contains the story of an officer who refuses to drag bodies down from a mountain ambush in the middle of the night for inspection and verification, not because he is covering up an atrocity but because he fears his men will be attacked if they don’t escape [and because I made this up–it's fiction]). There may have been cases in our battalion where civilians were killed by infantrymen or helicopters while running away or by artillery fire called when our troops were under fire.

The following description is from an article in the 1^st Air Cavalry Division newspaper, “The Cavalier”, September 27, 1967, about an operation that occurred in Binh Dinh Province in central South Vietnam near Bong Son and the coast. It inspired a major scene in Cologne No. 10 For Men, as well as the song on my Skytroopers album “Canh Giao Cave” (lyrics at http://richardmorrisauthor.wordpress.com/skytroopers/lyrics/, or hear it at http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/richardmorris), and demonstrates how we treated our prisoners.

“The wounded were immediately medevacked. After the others ate, drank water and saw daylight again, Captain Pratt asked them to go back into their cave and any other caves they were aware of and bring out their comrades. One of the prisoners was killed when he went back into a cave.” This is not fiction, but it, too, is anecdotal information. Still, it exemplifies reports that Turse should have explored before branding all Vietnam veterans baby killers and war criminals. I believe most veterans would testify that they were never were given orders of this type.

_______________________________________________________________

 ”Rockpile” at Chanh Giao

Rockpile 1 from September 1967 Cavalair

Page 1 (larger view) 

Rockpile 2 from September 1967 Cavalair

Page 2 (larger view)

Rockpile 3 from September 27 Cavalair

Page 3 (larger view)
Division Citation

__________________________________________________________________

All said, however, Turse has presented some information that seems horrendous and indisputable: for instance, his description of Operation Speedy Express in the delta from January through April 1969 by the 9^th Infantry Division under the command of Lt. General Julian Ewell. In this operation almost 6,500 tactical air strikes unloaded 5,078 tons of bombs and 1,784 tons of napalm on the hamlets and countryside of the delta.  “The Division had reported killing 10,899 enemy troops…[but] recovered only 748 weapons…. During the week of April 19… 699 guerrillas had been added to the division’s body count (at the cost of a single American life), but only nine weapons were captured.” The kill ratio of enemy dead to U.S. dead for the first month was 24:1 and jumped “to an astounding 68:1 in March and an eyepopping 134:1 in April.” This, along with the hundreds of thousands of refugees that were driven from the country to the cities or to “New Life” hamlets, seems to be irrefutable evidence of the indiscriminate killing of thousands of Vietnamese civilians and the destruction of their homes.

It makes me wonder if this murderous attack on the Vietnamese people may have been aimed at bringing an end to the war (the Paris peace negotiations began on May 10, 1968 and were ongoing), just as the bombing and killing of hundreds of thousands of civilians in Germany and Japan were used to try to break the will of the people and end World War II. To me, this makes the killing of civilians no less a crime.

In the end, I conclude, with Nick Turse, that in many cases, official military policy in Vietnam led to massive killing of innocent civilians. However, please let’s not return to the time when returning solders were spat upon and called baby killers. We have only this year finally been welcomed home by an American President at the Wall on Memorial Day 2012 and thanked for our service (http://richardmorrisauthor.wordpress.com/2012/05/29/not-as-predicted). God bless him.

Vietnam was a horrible war that cannot be forgotten. But the lessons from it do seem to have been forgotten. It was from hearing news reports about similarities between Vietnam and Iraq, including reports of heavy civilian casualties, that made me take Cologne No. 10 For Men off the shelf and get it published.

“I do not like green eggs and ham!”

Today I found I have something new in common with First Lady Michelle Obama. We both read Green Eggs and Ham by Dr. Seuss to children during Read Across America Day sponsored by NEA. We both got to read, “I do not LIKE green eggs and ham, Sam I am.” My students were third graders. What a joy. They all listened attentively and really were involved even though they had all read the book before. Along the way, I had to ask if they like broccoli. Some did, some didn’t. “You should try it!” I said. I followed the reading with a story of my own–a canoe story (from my upcoming young adult novel Canoedling) about battling a school of piranhas in the Amazon River and being saved by the school teacher. Coincidentally, they had just finished studying about piranhas. One child followed up with the standard question, “Was that a real story?” I replied, “Yes…but of course, it was fiction.” “Maybe it was realistic fiction,” another suggested. Fiction is a wonderful word. I’m glad I didn’t have to say, “No, it wasn’t real. I was lying.”

On http://youtu.be/wihLQ5ePUgo David Levy tells it all.  Animals overhear a human terrorist plot to launch a nuclear strike that could result in world-wide destruction and the death of all animal life. They hastily hold a Congress, led by Old Eddie, the wisest elephant at National Zoo, and plot to save the planet by taking it over. Will they succeed? Who can say? This is the plot for Levy’s sneaky, scary, and satisfying satire for young adults like me.

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Stanford Pritchard

Lost what? Creddlebones, of course. They’re those things in Stanford Pritchard’s new novel, Three Sexes in Search of the Creddlebones. I’m on a Stanford Pritchard tear after reading and really liking his novel Benny’s Mission. Now this one. It’s a ride through his mind. I found it really funny, in a droll way. Once I was reminded of “My Uncle Solomon” (see “Cuts From Cologne,” a tab on this website under Cologne No. 10 For Men). Pritchard lampoons the historical research establishment–in libraries behind the ivy-covered walls, and on archaeological digs of the past, and as he tells surreal stories  about the search for the creddlebones. And what are creddlebones? Yes, of course you have to read the book to find out.

Pritchard tells stories about fictitious generals of the past; the demise of ancient walled cities, which people have replaced with walls around themselves; individuals playing roles in a “theater with no director,” acting and dressing like everyone else playing their role; Calligraphes, the little-known Roman philosopher, and his scheme to rename the stars, and rearrange and rename the constellations; a trip to a town that no one inhabits; a “ghost lecturer” telling a “curt historian” about Renaissance television, which was snuffed out because it was hypnotizing people and becoming a religion and an agent of repression; a graduate student facing a one-month deadline for finishing her doctoral thesis–her definitive work on the creddlebones–who screams obscenities, does cartwheels in the reading room, and leaves her library prison of seven years, goes out into the world for a year, dialogues with doors and talks to walls and garbagecans, and decides that the creddlebones are irrevocably lost; Thomas Peters, who lapses into silence and is praised by critics for his book with no print, blank art canvases, and empty sculpture exhibition spaces; and finally, Rob and Marianne, who discover why “three” sexes have driven them apart and what, exactly, the creddlebones are. This eccentric novel made me laugh uncontrollably and cast me on my own lifelong search for the creddlebones. I loved it.

Also see The Elements of Style Updated and Annotated For Present-Day Use by  William Strunk, Jr. and Stanford Pritchard.

Benny’s Mission
by Stanford Pritchard

Recently, I read Benny’s Mission by Stanford Pritchard. This satirical saga carried me away and enthralled me with its story about Benny Wise. So I had to write a review of it:

Benny’s Mission is an American classic–part Candide, part Forrest Gump, part
Huckleberry Finn. Join Benny Wise on his lifetime odyssey as radical political
organizer, revolutionary, longshoreman, cabdriver, fish-packer, blood donor,
get-rich-quick artist, fighter pilot, speechwriter, warmonger, reporter, city
council member, and mayoral candidate. Follow him as he stirs old people into
angry purpose—and a belief in eternal life on earth—and probes the injustices
of life. A brilliant satire of the moral, political, and social philosophies of
our age, with meat and humor for us all, and some echoes from Cologne No. 10 For Men.  —R.M.