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Veterans' Testimony

By Anne Pyburn (reviewer)

Vietnam: Our Father Daughter Journey
By Ed and Zoeann Murphy
(Philmark, 2006)

The Last Dead Soldier Left Alive
By Richard Boes
(iUniverse Inc., 2007)

The Making and Un-Making of a Marine
By Larry Winters
(Millrockwriters.com, 2007)

As our nation fiercely debates the proper causes, objectives, and end point of yet another war, three veterans of the previous generation's battle have stepped forward to offer powerful testimony: how they got there, what they saw there, what it did to them - and the struggle to come all the way home.

It's worth noting that all three of these Hudson Valley authors volunteered. Murphy, who served as an intelligence agent, left a Paulist seminary to join the military and was already convinced that the war was wrong before he ever arrived. Winters and Boes both joined up because it seemed like a better option than staying home. Whatever illusions any of them might have had of glory were soon blown sky high by the reality on the ground.

Murphy began working with Vietnam Veterans Against the War soon after discharge, and his book is the most political and academic of the three, though not oppressively so. His numerous return trips, one of which included daughter Zoe, left him with a passionate love of the land he'd been sent to fight and a large dollop of Buddhist philosophy flavoring his spiritual life. Numerous photos help us to experience this unlikely love affair through his eyes.

Larry Winters was a Marine grunt, bunking in a tent referred to by the rest of the platoon as "The Wild Kingdom" for the shenanigans and radical politics of its inhabitants. A young poet in the making, his belief in God and Country shortly shot to hell, he lived to come home and then found homecoming to be a struggle all its own. His journey led him to study psychodrama and become a therapist, and that perspective informs his look backward into his life before, during, and after The Nam.

Like Murphy, Winters returned, as one of a group of psychologists there to study Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. And like Murphy, he sought and found a sense of atonement. Yet both books make one thing abundantly clear: we should think at least twice before we teach young men to kill, and expecting them to do so for the wrong reasons is tantamount to spiritual rape.

Richard Boes has written a ripped-from-the-heart memoir of the years of struggle, substance abuse, and failed relationships that followed his combat experience. It's painful and yet richly rewarding. Imagine sitting down in a pub next to a slightly scary-looking fellow who buys you a round and then begins to talk, words spilling out in a heated rush, things bottled up within him all flooding to the surface- and although some of what he is saying may be hard to hear, it is made compelling by his wry, ironic perspective and his stream-of-consciousness style, akin to Henry Miller or Jack Kerouac. At closing time, you'd be inviting him home for a nightcap to hear the rest - no matter if it disturbed your sleep for weeks to come.

It has taken these men decades to process their various experiences into art, and powerful art it is. It is a truism that any organization will be badly run unless the men in the boardroom understand the perspective of the folks in the trenches; one senses that if the current cabal of neocon opportunists had had to go where these three had been, there would never have been an invasion of Iraq. And what they are offering us will become ever more valuable as more and more young men- and women- return from the unforgiving desert needing a light on the path homeward.