Arts of War on the Web

Citrus College in Glendora, California, is now offering its entire Boots to Books curriculum, which is aimed at helping young, returning veteran college students, to any college or university for a moderate charge, which goes to help support the College’s veterans program and organization. For more information go to the Boots to Books website:

The Citrus College program is run by Bruce O. Solheim, an Army veteran and history professor who has taught the history of the war on the collegiate level for fourteen years. Solheim also serves as the College’s Volunteer Veterans Coordinator.

The latest Bridges:The Lessons of Vietnam, the newsletter written and produced by Lindy Poling’s (above) Lessons of Vietnam history students at Millbrook High School in Raleigh, North Carolina, is a special 10th Anniversary Edition. The issue may be found on line on the course’s website, which also features a new podcast.

The featured article on the front page is “Vietghanistan?” in which student Andy Chenlo examines the similarities and differences between the Vietnam War and the current war in Afghanistan. There’s also an article by 2003 graduate Susan Woodson reflecting on the class’s big impact on her life.

VVA life member Ira Cooperman once again this year will be teaching the “Remembering the Vietnam War” course at the Chautauqua Institution in New York. Cooperman, who served as a USAF intelligence officer in Vietnam and Thailand in 1965-66, developed the course last year with Bob Hopper, a former Foreign Service Officer.

The course is part of Chautauqua’s Special Studies program of weekly classes, and will be held from July 27-31 from 9:00–10:15 a.m. Cooperman and Hopper will examine the history, impact and consequences of America’s involvement in Vietnam and Southeast Asia from 1955-75 through personal experiences, literature and films.

During once class last summer the instructors and students discussed Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. This summer they will be discussing one of Philip Caputo’s works. You can read the entire course description at the Special Studies page.

“If any VVA member is interested in registering for this summer’s course, I’d be pleased to help them through the process,” Cooperman told us. Email him at ibcooperman@aol.com

The University of Iowa’s College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, in conjunction with the University’s Veterans Center, is offering Identity and Social Issues: Wounded Warriors: Veterans in Literature and Film, a class this summer taught by creative nonfiction instructor Stephen A Kuusisto. The class runs from June 9 to July 31 and meets twice a week on the Iowa City campus.

“Disability has always been a difficult subject in literature and film,” the course description says. “Disabled characters often challenge cultural ideas of ‘normalcy’ while they also complicate the symbolism of the ‘heroic’ body. This course explores the contradictions in the representations of disability in literature and film by focusing on the experiences of veterans with disabilities.

Specifically we will analyze representations of veterans with disabilities in literature and film and seek to understand the wounded body in its political, social, and cultural contexts. Additionally we will explore how literature both reflects and distorts the experiences of returning veterans.”

The films and books the course cover will include several dealing with the Vietnam War, such as Ron Kovic’s primal scream of a memoir, Born on the Fourth of July and the accompanying film by Oliver Stone, and The Deer Hunter (above). It also includes the great post-WWII film the Best Years of our Lives, as well as selections from the writings of Toni Morrison, Ernest Hemingway, Tim O’Brien, Studs Terkel, and Norman Mailer.

For info, email stephen-kuusisto@uiowa.edu or john-mikelson@uiowa.edu, go to www.uiowa.edu/~uiva ohn D. Mikelson or call 319-384-2020.

Tim O’Brien, the acclaimed novelist (Going After Cacciato, The Things They Carried, et al.) and Vietnam War veteran who teaches at Texas State University, San Marcos, will take part in two events on Sunday, March 8, and Monday, March 9, at Brookdale Community College in New Jersey.

He will host “An Afternoon With Tim O’Brien” on March 8, at 1:00 p.m., and be the featured guest in the college’s Visiting Writer Series on March 9 at 7:00 p.m. The events are sponsored by the New Jersey Vietnam Veterans Memorial Foundation and Brookdale’s Visiting Writers Series.

The $5 donation suggested for the Sunday event will benefit the New Jersey Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial Foundation. For info about the Sunday event, call 732-335-0033 or go to the N.J. Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial website. To learn more about the Monday talk, email sparker@brookdalecc.edu, call 732-224-2650, or go to http://www.app.com/article/20090304/GETPUBLISHED/90304039

The Writer’s Center in Bethesda, Maryland (just outside of the nation’s capital) will hold a second veterans’ writing workshop April 6-May 18. This free, six-week prose-writing workshop is aimed at active-duty troops, veterans, and their dependents. The workshops are part of the National Endowment for the Arts’ Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience, the innovative program that documents and preserves the wartime experiences of men and women in uniform and their families.

The newest Operation Homecoming workshops will be held at VA Medical Centers, military hospitals, and affiliated centers such as the D.C. Writer’s Workshop, in communities around the country. Operation Homecoming is a partnership with the Department of Defense and the VA, and is strongly supported by The Boeing Company.

The Writer’s Center workshop will be led by James Mathews (above), an Iraq War veteran and the author of the award-winning short story collection Last Known Position. He joins an impressive list of writers who have conducted more than 60 Operation Homecoming writing workshops here and overseas. That list includes Tobias Wolff, Jeff Shaara, Marilyn Nelson, Bobbie Ann Mason, Joe Haldeman, Richard Currey, and Mark Bowden.

This workshop is limited to 16 participants who will be selected on a first come, first served basis. For info or to register, call 301-654-8664.

Bruce O. Solheim, an Army veteran and a history professor at Citrus College in California, has taught the history of the war on the collegiate level for fourteen years. His latest book, The Vietnam War Era: A Personal Journey, provides an excellent summary of the history of the war with enlightening sidebars on many people who were involved in it, as well as the personal story of his older brother’s Vietnam War experiences and his two post-Vietnam War Army tours of duty.

Solheim also serves as the Volunteer Veterans Coordinator at Citrus College, where he runs the Boots to Books class, which, he says, is aimed at “engaging and healing” young, returning veterans.

Solheim recently won a battle against that institution’s administration, which was about to drop its Vietnam War and World War II history courses. When word got out about the proposed course cuts, Solheim went into action. He made a strong pitch that both popular courses were important to the school’s Veterans Program, in that they went a long way toward helping returning veterans enrolled in the courses understand their wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and they also helped older veterans who take part in the courses by coming in and sharing their oral histories.

Bruce Solheim says he hopes that the victory to keep the Vietnam War and WWII history classes at Citrus College will encourage professors at other colleges and universities who may be facing similar cuts.

When I learned last week that Larry Heinemann, the noted Vietnam veteran novelist, is now teaching at Texas A&M, I wrote an entry on this page. Then I remembered that another celebrated novelist who served on the ground in the Vietnam War, Tim O’Brien, also has been teaching in Texas.

In fact, O’Brien—whose surrealistic, in-country novel Going After Cacciato won the National Book Award, and whose novelistically written memoir If I Die in A Combat Zone and interconnected short stories, The Things They Carried, deal with the Vietnam War—has been teaching at Texas State University, San Marcos since 1999.

According to a page on the school’s web site, ten years ago, when O’Brien was living in Cambridge, Mass., Tom Grimes, the novelist who teaches at TSUSM, invited him to come to the San Marcos, which is located between Austin and San Antonio in the Lone Star State.

“I spoke with Tim in 1998, and he agreed to come here for a year,” Grimes, who is is the head of Texas State’s MFA in creative writing program, said. “He came, and loved the program so much that he decided to stay, and of course we arranged that.”

O’Brien now lives in Central Texas, where he is working on his next book. That one, he says, will be based on his experiences as a 61-year-old father of two boys, ages 2 and 4. “It’s a combination of fiction and nonfiction,” O’Brien—who named his main character “Tim O’Brien” in The Things They Carried—says.

He teaches full time every other year at Texas State (formerly known as Southwest Texas State), spending one semester teaching MFA students, and the next semester talking to undergraduate English classes, conducting small workshops, and participating in campus events such as Scholars Day. On alternate years, he teaches workshops to MFA students in the Creative Writing Program.

“It’s the kind of environment I can thrive in,” O’Brien says of Texas State. “The students are really top notch, and my colleagues, like Dagoberto Gilb and Tom Grimes, are good teachers. They take it seriously, work hard at it, and they’re also good writers.”

Larry Heinemann (above), the much-honored novelist who put in a life-changing 1967-68 tour of duty in the Vietnam War with a 25th Infantry Division mechanized infantry battalion, has journeyed from his home town of Chicago to become Writer in Residence in the English Department at Texas A&M University in College Station.

Heinemann’s autobiographical Close Quarters (1977) is one of the most under appreciated in-county Vietnam War novels. His second literary effort, Paco’s Story (1987), a biting tale of the war’s brutal emotional aftermath, won the National Book Award for fiction. Heinemann followed that with a comic novel set in his home town, Cooler By the Lake, which came out in 1992.

Heinemann’s most-recent book is Black Virgin Mountain: A Return to Vietnam , (2005) which is part memoir, part travelogue, and part political treatise. It’s a creatively written look at the author’s eventful Vietnam War tour, as well as a meditation on two of his trips to Vietnam in the early 1990s, along with a strong indictment of the politicians and generals who waged that war.

Aside from teaching writing in the Lone Star State, Heinemann also is working on a murder mystery and a collection of Vietnamese folktales. For a sample poem “The Geese” (first published in Hanoi), and an excerpt from Black Virgin Mountain, go to this Texas A&M web site.

The new Fall 2008 issue of Bridges, the newsletter written and produced by Lindy Poling’s Lessons of Vietnam history students at Millbrook High School in Raleigh, North Carolina, is now on the web.

The issue includes “Unlocking My Father’s Past,” an article by student Michael Nguyen about his father, Luong Nguyen, who as a young South Vietnamese Navy officer went to The Naval
Officers Candidate Academy in Newport, Rhode Island, as part of the Nixon Administration’s Vietnamization program, then served in Vietnam until the war ended in 1975. After the war he was put in a re-education camp for five long years—an experience that the father had never shared with his son.

Michael Nguyen was born in Vietnam in 1991, and came to this country in 1993 “through a humanitarian program that allowed Vietnamese POWs who had spent five or more years in a reeducation camp to immigrate to the U.S,” he says in the article.

It was through a class assignment that Luong Nguyen first told his war and post-war experiences to his son. “Hearing my father’s story for the first time was a surreal moment in my life,” Michael Nguyen said. “Learning about my father’s experiences made me realize that this was a man who has sacrificed so much for my very existence. My Lessons of Vietnam class became the key to opening the door to my father’s past—a door bolted shut for many years.”