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John Ketwig, Presente!

By Jan Barry

John Ketwig made a public service campaign of speaking forthrightly to high school and college students. Challenged by students' questions, he wrote Vietnam Reconsidered: The War, the Times, and Why They Matter, published in 2019. This is a long-considered sequel to Ketwig's mind-blowing war memoir: …and a hard rain fell, published in 1985.

Amid his professional career as an automobile service manager, side trips as an author doing speaking engagements, and activism with Vietnam Veterans Against the War protesting US military interventions that kept popping up around the world, Ketwig read piles of books about Vietnam and the wider events of that era.

"I have been obsessed, trying to put it all together," he wrote in Vietnam Reconsidered. "Trying to understand." And to share what he learned. Whenever we'd get together, he'd regale me with one of his latest revelations. He discovered from obscure books and rare news reports, for instance, that the black market he witnessed in Vietnam and Thailand was a tiny part of a vast network of corruption run by American military officers, high-ranking sergeants, Vietnamese military, and shady businessmen and women that sold everything from rifles to explosives to trucks stolen from US military supply shipments. That rip-off campaign, he noted, mushroomed into reports of billions of dollars lost or unaccounted for in Iraq and Afghanistan.

John Ketwig was on an unrelenting quest to dig deeper into what the war in Southeast Asia did to so many people, civilians and soldiers, Asians and Americans, and what to do about it.

"Please don't thank me for my service," he wrote. "I was playing in a rock 'n roll band when they came for me, reciting songs about understanding and brotherhood and love. They took me against my will, stripped me naked and beat me bloody, and they sent me to the other side of the world where death fell out of the sky and exploded, and its shards tore up anything and anybody they hit. …

"Please oh please don't thank me. If you want to express something, promise me you will get involved in the struggle to abolish wars. ... Then, I will thank you."

Jan Barry is a poet, journalist, author, and activist. He is one of the founders of Vietnam Veterans Against the War.

John Ketwig in Vietnam, 1968.