Arts of War on the Web

A top-quality multi-media (photos, audio and words) page on The New York Times’ nytimes.com called “Veterans’ Voices” came on line on October 1. Produced by Derrick Henry and Catrin Einhorn, it features the voices of men who served with Alpha Troop of the 11th Armored Cavalry in Vietnam in 1969-70, talking about their experiences during and after the war.

Take a look at
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/10/01/20091001-vietnam-audio.html?hp

I had an email the other day from Laura Hammons, the founder of Daughters of Vietnam Veterans, a vibrant and talented group of daughters and sons of Vietnam veterans from all over the world. The group is made up of artists, musicians, playwrights, photographers, journalists and others from the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Puerto Rico, and Vietnam. They have an excellent web site, and are looking to expand their membership.

“Our mission,” Hammons says, “is to enable ’sisters’ to use this organization to network with other ’sisters and brothers’ with advocacy projects through artistic means.” Many of the advocacy projects are humanitarian and peace-making efforts throughout the world. Another of the group’s priorities is to bring awareness of secondary post-traumatic stress disorder.

You can read Le Ho Lan’s autobiographical Stories of a North Vietnamese Childhood—which deal with a girl growing up in North Vietnam and her family, neighbors, and friends before and during the American war—on the free website Scribd.com

Some of the stories are set in Hanoi; others are set in the village where the narrator
goes to live with her grandmother after the bombing of Hanoi starts.

You can look at a large array of the Vietnam War photographs of the famed French photojournalist Francois Sully at a new site on the University of Massachusetts, Boston’s Healy Library’s web page. The site is part of an extensive catalog of Sully’s Vietnam War work that is archived at the library.

The collection also includes articles and clippings published in the United States and in South and North Vietnam, government and military press packages, captured documents, contact sheets, negatives, and submission sheets Sully sent to Newsweek, color slides, and military publicity photographs.

Francois Sully served withe the French Army in Vietnam in the 1940s. After his discharge in Saigon in 1947, he became a correspondent for Vietnamese and French publications. He lived in Saigon and worked for Newsweek from 1961 until his death in a helicopter crash in 1971.

The U.S. Army’s Center of Military History’s Web catalog of its publications has recently been redone with big changes in design and content. The new electronic catalog now includes all 600-plus Center publications. The user-friendly site includes cover images, descriptions of the books, and short author bios. Plus, there’s a search feature (”Browse all”) that allows you to find publications by title, by author, and by publication number.

There’s also a link to sign up in order to become a member of a listserv, which includes receiving receive timely alerts of new Center publications. Plus, there’s a link to get to the current and past copies of the Center’s bulletin, Army History.

I just found out about a terrific web site called Wikivietlit, a first-class Wiki-type compendium of information designed for those interested in Vietnamese literature.

The site, which is run by nonprofit Viet Nam Literature Project, follows the Wiki formula of using volunteer contributors. They cover many different topics in the Vietnamese literature realm, including the works, authors, periods, publishers, critics, scholars, magazines, websites, issues, controversies, genres and themes.

The site specializes in articles about literature from the Republic of Viet Nam from 1954-75, and the Vietnamese diaspora. Nearly all deal with Vietnamese and Vietnamese-American writers, but there also are a few articles on American Vietnam War veteran writers, including David Willson,the author of the REMF Diary novels.

For more info, email editor@vietnamlit.org

The new website, snagfilms.com, is an online library of about 700 full-length documentaries that you can watch for free through the site. That includes a fistful of Vietnam War-related docs such as:

• Heart Of Darkness - The Vietnam War Chronicles: 1945-1975
• Vietnam’s Unseen War
• Arlington: Field of Honor
• Vietnam: Long Time Coming
  

On Friday, May 22, the Writer’s Center in Bethesda, Maryland, will present a screening of the documentary, Muse of Fire, a film by Lawrence Bridges that looks at the National Endowment for the Arts’ Operation Homecoming project, which brings together some of the nations top writers (many of whom are Vietnam veterans) and aspiring young veteran writers. Jon Peede, NEA’s Director of Literature Grants Programs and a driving force behind Operation Homecoming, will introduce the film. He will lead a roundtable Q&A after the showing with the poet E. Ethelbert Miller, workshop instructor James Mathews, and one or two workshop participants. The Writer’s Center is located at 4508 Walsh Street in downtown Bethesda. The event is free and open to the public. To register, go to the center’s website. Muse of Fire includes readings and interviews with U.S. troops and their families, along with commentary from a slew of authors and actors who took part in the program. That includes Dana Gioia, Mark Bowden, Ray bradbury, Jeff Shaara, and Andrew Carroll. The original Operation Homecoming workshop participants included Vietnam veteran writers Tobias Wolff, Joe Haldeman, and Richard Currey.

The new web site, Stories of War, created by Alex Haldi, Brian Turner, and Eric Leventhal, wants to hear from from veterans of all ages and wars who have stories to tell. “It can be any experience you’ve had–from facing combat to returning home or just taking a day off,” they note on the sites’ homepage. “We are also interested in stories from loved ones about people who have gone to war. These stories can be either positive or negative; we want to hear them all.”

The web site’s production team will take some of the submitted stories and turn them over to professional artists, photographers, and musicians, who, in turn, will create artistic works based on those words. A portion of the profits gleaned from those professional art works will be donated to support veterans’ groups, Turner told us.

Entries should be under 300 words and emailed to storiesofwar09@gmail.com Submissions or any artistic endeavors created from them will not be published without the consent of the author.

Take a look at the site and if you decide to submit a war story, please mention your read about it on this page, VVA’s Arts of War on the Web.

Back in 1985, Vietnam Veterans of America’s legal team was the primary force behind The Viet Vet Survival Guide: How to Cut Through the Bureaucracy and Get What You Need–And Are Entitled To. That book, written by Craig Kubey and now out of print, provided a reader-friendly, step-by-step guide for Vietnam veterans, showing how to file claims for VA disability benefits and apply for VA mortgages, education programs and pensions, among many other things.

Now comes The American Veterans’ and Servicemembers’ Survival Guide, the grandson of VVA’s guidebook. The new book (in came out in December), which is available on line, is aimed at veterans of the Vietnam War and those from subsequent wars. It was put together by Veterans for America, formerly the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation (which was not affiliated with VVA). David Addlestone, a longtime veterans’ advocacy attorney (and a VVA life member), is one of the authors.

It is available as a free download at veteransforamerica.org.