Arts of War on the Web

Last week the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund announced a national call for photographs of the more than 58,000 men and women whose names are on The Wall in Washington. The photos will be featured in a high-tech display in the proposed $85 million underground Education Center that is planned nearby.

In an event held at the Newseum in Washington, former Nebraska Sen. (and Vietnam veteran) Chuck Hagel and Peter Holt, the owner of the San Antonio Spurs (and a Vietnam veteran and the chair of the Campaign to Build the Education Center), joined VVMF head Jan Scruggs to kick off the endeavor, which has had a jump start with the thousands of photos that the the Fund has collected that appear on its “Virtual Wall” web site on the Internet.

“We’ve got 10,000 already,” Scruggs told The Washington Post. “By the time we get this built, we’ll have 80 to 85 percent of them. And then, within 10 days, we’ll have the rest.”

For info on how to submit a photo, go to the VVMF web page.

Tim O’Brien, the much-honored novelist whose work is strongly influenced by his Vietnam War service has an interesting essay called “Telling Tails” that deals with what he calls “the centrality of imagination in enduring fiction” in the current, 2009 fiction issue of The Atlantic.

He begins with the tail story, a lighthearted on centering on his two young children (Timmy and Tad), which may or may not be true,and probably isn’t. Then he goes on to discuss his subject.

“In general,” O’Brien says, fictional topics are “born out of writing workshops, in which I’ve noticed, almost always to my alarm, that classroom discussion seems to revolve almost exclusively around issues of verisimilitude. Declarations such as these abound: I didn’t believe in that character. I need to know more about that character’s background. I can’t see that character’s face. I don’t understand why that character would behave so insipidly (or violently, or whatever).

“These are legitimate questions. But for me, as a reader, the more dangerous problem with unsuccessful stories is usually much less complex: I am bored. And I would remain bored even if the story were packed with pages of detail aimed at establishing verisimilitude. I would believe in the story, perhaps, but I would still hate it. To provide background and physical description and all the rest is of course vital to fiction, but vital only insofar as such detail is in the service of a richly imagined story, rather than in the service of good botany or good philosophy or good geography.”

If you’re in the San Antonio, Texas, area, you can hear Tim O’Brien in person. He’ll be doing a reading on Monday, Sept. 21, at 10:00 a.m. at St. Philip’s College’s Watson Fine Arts Center in The President’s Lecture Series. O’Brien (that’s him above in Vietnam) will be reading from his critically and popularly acclaimed 1990 book of linked-short stories (featuring main character Tim O’Brien) The Things They Carried.

For additional information, call 210-486-2376, or go to http://www.alamo.edu/spc/main/pls.aspx

The The Most Dangerous Man in America, a new documentary co-directed by Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith, had its debut September 11 at the Toronto International Film Festival. The film, which opens in several theaters around the nation this week, tells the story of Daniel Ellsberg who made his mark in American history in 1971 when he leaked the Pentagon Papers.

The documentary, which Ellsberg narrates, also covers his life as a gung-ho Marine in the mid-sixties, and his conversion to Vietnam War skeptic–and then to antiwar activist–after he went over there and saw first hand what was happening in the field.

“The movie is an act of hero worship, but it inadvertently suggests that, without a necessary touch of grandiosity, Ellsberg might never have acted as bravely as he did,” The New Yorker film reviewer David Denby noted in his otherwise positive review.

David Edelstein, writing in New York magazine, had nothing but praise for the movie. The film, he said, “offers one revelatory interview after another mixed with reenactments (animated) that have fun with the caper-movie aspect and build real suspense. So many people risked their livelihoods to put the 7,000-page Pentagon Papers out there—although its most tangible result was the creation of Nixon’s plumbers unit.”

On May 17, 1968, during the height of the Vietnam War–and of the antiwar movement–nine people, including two priests and a former nun, broke into a suburban Baltimore draft board (in Catonsville, Maryland), and burned several hundred files with home-made napalm. The protesters, including their leader, Father Daniel Berrigan, were arrested and put on trial, an event that was a media sensation in which the defendants were dubbed “the Catonsville Nine.”

Daniel Berrigan went on to write “The Trial of the Catonsville Nine,” a play based on the bombastic trail’s goings on. It premiered in 1971 in Los Angeles. Since then, the play has had several incarnations. The latest is a now-touring production by the non-profit, politically oriented Actors’ Gang of Hollywood founded by, among others, the actor Tim Robbins.

The show features an ensemble cast going through their paces on a bare-bones, abstract courtroom set, behind which looms an American flag. “While one is humbled by the nine’s moral rigor, the play is more sermon than debate,” Charlotte Stoudt wrote in her recent L.A. Times review. “The real drama lies in the conversion stories each defendant recounts — experiences after which they could not continue their lives as before. Bigotry in the South, bombing in Africa, murder in Guatemala: The Berrigans may have been on trial, but it’s the American government that is indicted here.”

The next gig for the play will be on September 12 at the Reston, Virginia, Community Center, followed by will two performances, September 17 and 18,  at the University of Maryland’s Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center in College Park. It then heads for Australia’s Brisbane Festival for three performances, September 24-27.

Several events, under the rubric of  “the Catonsville Nine Engagement Project,” will take place in and around the U. of Maryland in conjunction with the play.  At 7:00 p.m. on Friday, September 18, for example, there will be a panel discussion at the Robert and Arlene Kogod Studio Theatre dealing with the university during the Vietnam War. Among other things, a student uprising shut down the school in 1970 following the incursion into Cambodia. The events are part of the U of M’s “Semester on Peace.”

Jeanne Giaimis at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey, is in the early stages of writing a book about African-American women who served in the military or in civilian jobs in Vietnam, Thailand, and Japan from 1954-75. “There have been no books written about this group,” Giaimis told us, “and I would therefore as a historian like to share their stories as a part of American history.”

As “a member of the baby boom generation, I am aware that younger generations have very little knowledge of the Vietnam War,” said said. “I would like to do my part to see that this chapter in our history is not forgotten.”

If you fit the bill and would like to be a part of the book, contact Giaimis at 201-675-6465 (cell); 973-353-3557 (work); or by email: giaimis@andromeda.rutgers.edu

If you do, tell her you read about her work right here at VVA’s Arts of War on the Web page.