Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace
Author Biographies (alphabetical order - click on letter)

DOWNLOAD AUTHORS' BIOS (Click to download pdf file)

A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | R | S | T | U | W | Y | Z


JOE LAMB
I served as a hospital corpsman in the United States Navy from 1968 through 1971, during which time I worked on intensive care and psychiatric wards. My jobs after the military have included building solar homes, teaching ecology, and organizing against nuclear weapons. In 1990, I founded the Borneo Project, a nongovernmental organization that promotes rainforest preservation and indigenous rights. I am co-owner of Brende&Lamb, a company that cares for trees. I live in Berkeley, California, with my wife, Anna; my four-year-old daughter, Carson Lamb; and our dog Xtra.

ROBERT LANDMAN
In 1969, I was in the infantry on the front lines in Viet Nam. After nine months, I had a unique encounter on a mountainside with a North Vietnamese soldier that changed my life. “The True Geography of Meeting” is the story of that encounter and all that followed.

Currently, I live on a mountainside in Occidental, California, called “The Place of Peace” by the Pomo Indians, the first people who lived here. It is a good place to “be in the silence” to better hear the voice of Spirit. This is where “In the Silence” came to be written, although about a silence of a different kind.

Since the beginning of the Veteran Writers’ Group, I have worked with many forms of storytelling and writing. I discovered that screenplay writing is a powerful way to shine light on the great mysteries of life and a profound way to express the deeper truths as they are revealed. A good story can become a great movie that can transform people’s lives and the world.

Over many years, Maxine Hong Kingston, Earll Kingston, and many other members of the Veteran’s Writer’s Group and I have been working on a story for a movie. It is based on the writings of Maxine Hong Kingston and original ideas from our meetings. Called The Way of Peace, it begins in ancient China, where the lives of a young girl and boy interweave over three lifetimes. With a charge from their ancestors, each searches for the lost Book of Peace. In an unfortunate incident and loss of innocence, they enter into an escalating cycle of violence that spans continents and centuries. Ultimately, they find the Book of Peace. As they read the Book of Peace, the fragile, ancient text disintegrates in their hands. What they learn is enough to begin a new path, but with a catch . . . Their story is our story, for our time and our world.

Over a lifetime of reflection, I have come to believe that everyone has a gift. Finding, developing, and sharing our gift is our true work. The fruit of our work is our gift to Spirit and to each other. Our gifts grow best in peace. The greatest gifts foster peace. My greatest prayer: May everyone find and share their gift. May everyone live in peace.

WILLIAM LARSEN
The road to hell, they say, is paved with good intentions. So was the path most of us took to Vietnam. In my case, this involved my father, Earnie Larsen, a warm, rough sports-obsessed man of Viking heritage who valued physical prowess to an extreme degree. Unfortunately, I took after my maternal grandfather, a small artistic fellow whose only obsession was his clarinet. Never doubting my father’s love, I was nonetheless unable to excel on the athletic fields that so captivated his attention.

But I did find a way, and that was the war in Southeast Asia.

Much later, I discovered that healing combat trauma often demands resolving the initial motivation that led to the battlefield, as well as what happened on it. Men go to war for many reasons. The most common, I believe, is blind obedience and the surrender of our moral authority. My father loved me dearly, but carried into adulthood wounds of violence and self-doubt that compromised his ability to parent wisely.

In the way of fathers and sons, his doubt became my doubt.

On the day I was wounded, I realized I had crawled into battle as much to win Dad’s approval as to help wounded grunts. If Vietnam taught me any one thing, it is that I alone am responsible for my choices. This is a lesson I have tried to represent in my personal life and psychotherapeutic work with combat vets and others.

PAULINE LAURENT

On May 10, 1968, my husband, Sgt. Howard E. Querry, was killed in the jungles of Vietnam. I was twenty-two years old and seven months pregnant.

For the following twenty-five years, I suffered from nightmares, depression, and unresolved grief. In 1990 after a significant loss, I fell into a major depressive episode. For the first time in my life, I lost my will to live.

Because I had a daughter still dependent upon me, I chose to investigate the loss rather than commit suicide. I started therapy, began 12-Step Recovery work for my addictions, and most importantly, started writing.

Writing was the container that could hold my grief. The blank page wanted to hear every last detail.

Since publishing my memoir, Grief Denied: A Vietnam Widow’s Story, I have been helping others explore their unresolved issues through my work as a Life Coach, an Inspirational Speaker, and a Workshop Leader. For more information visit: www.griefdenied.com and www.gutsycoaching.com

LE MINH KHUE
During the American War, I served in the Youth Volunteer Brigades working on the Ho Chi Minh Trails. Later I became a war correspondent. I was in the war from 1966 until its end in 1975, serving on some of the most dangerous battlefields. I’ve written eleven short story collections and novels, and I’m currently chief fiction editor of the Vietnam Writers Association Publishing House, and a consulting editor of Curbstone’s Voices from Vietnam series. Many of my stories and books are concerned with culture, environmental degradation, and human kindness, and in “Fragile as a Sunray” the dream of healing some of the wounds war left in my country.

JADE LEE
From my earliest memory, I was told what my duties and responsibilities to my family and my race were as a first-generation Chinese girl learning English in 1940s San Francisco Chinatown. The concepts of responsibility and duty were difficult for me to understand, though I did get that they were important and something I had to do, though I wasn’t sure why. As I was growing up, I faced sexual abuse, battering, and cultural and religious conflicts. I was usually told that the sexual abuse and beatings were my fault for something that was intrinsically wrong or “bad” about me, so I focused on myself to avoid being “bad.”

The events described in “Beating” marked a major change in my thinking and perception of my place in the world. When I saw the blood on the back of my grandmother’s bathrobe, I felt responsible for her pain, and from that time took on the responsibility for the wellbeing of the people I loved and, for many years later on, for the world.

It took several years of counseling, support groups, and “talk story” for me to be able to come to terms with the pain of my childhood. As a counselor and an activist I became comfortable speaking of the abuses in my childhood without shame or fear. A close comrade took me to the Veteran’s Writers’ group, led by Maxine Hong Kingston. “Beating” was the second thing I attempted to write after joining the group. After reading it and getting feedback from the group, I was able to see myself as a veteran of domestic wars.

MICHAEL LITLE
Two American wars bookend the middle passage of my life and the lives of the writers alongside me in the pages of this book. While my father was leading a battalion of helicopters in Viet Nam, I quit military service for good reason.

Let me begin at the beginning. In the spring of 1944, I crouched in my mother’s belly. At twenty-one years, my father was the trainer of bomber pilots until the U.S. Army Air Force put him on the short list of pilots to drop the atom bomb. I thank the infinite wisdom of the Pentagon that he was passed over as too young for the job.

I was born just as World War II ended. Civilian life didn’t suit my folks, so they reenlisted in the new aviation branch of the Army and got sent to Austria in 1949. During the fifties and sixties, I traveled as one of three dependents from Austria to Fort Bragg, Japan to Fort Rucker, France to Fort Leavenworth. My father is credited for his role in creating the helicopter-mounted machine gun. In 1965 to 1966, when my father joined the 1st Air Cav as a helicopter battalion commander, I joined ROTC at Dartmouth College. I twice refused military service: once with courage, once with cunning. After the birth of two sons, I began teaching college and making movies. In 2003, I went home to Fort Hood. Texas, to take care of my father in his last round with Parkinson’s disease just as the liberation of Iraq turned sour. While on errands, I began to interview the families of soldiers. (Readers can use Google to find the community blog HomefrontBulletin and watch these interviews.)

Over forty years, shame and guilt have circled over my manhood like birds of prey. Shame that I betrayed my father, guilt that good men went to war in my place. This is the account of how, watching over my father’s dying while the American War in Iraq turns sour, I redeem myself.

MORGAN JANE LOTT
I was born in Fairbanks, Alaska, of an Armenian father whose family escaped the 1911 genocide by the Turks, and I grew up under the shadow of the DEW line—the Distant Early Warning system that was supposed to alert the United States when the Russians attacked. My dad was a civil defense director, and it was his job to ensure that citizens stocked up on emergency supplies in the event of nuclear war. I worried because permafrost prevented anyone from digging a bomb shelter. But the things we worry about are seldom the things that destroy us.

Vietnam was at the other end of the world from my isolated life in Alaska. But it was a different enemy that took me prisoner a quarter of a century later. After eight years, I am still caught in the crossfire of the so-called War on Drugs, a war that blames its victims, criminalizes its wounded, and enriches its enemies. Like Vietnam, this U.S-backed war is a losing battle, and America has once again turned its back on those forced to fight on the front lines.