Category Archives: On writing

Posts on the process of writing, edits, response to comments, and miscellaneous information about the Pages, which is where you will find the book itself, A War Journal.

Done II

On writing, , ,

I actually think I am done now.

Well, I’m been thru everything again and re-edited. There are no major additions or changes to the order of pieces yet… but that may happen.

I do appreciate all of you who are reading this, as I know the story is not so sweet sometimes, and may actually be offensive to some sensibilities… but it’s just how things were from my perspective… and filtered thru my particular set of social understandings. Some of those understandings have moved along, changed, and expanded, but I’m not trying to re-formulate things based on my current perspective, as I wanted to present this story the way it seemed to me as I went thru it and as I looked back on it some years ago when I began the arduous process of writing it all down. (It’s been over 10 years, shall we say. All began with Jan’s writing group, the chapter on the Cabin beginning life as a short story for that group, who all said, “But it’s not believable.” To which I said, hmmm, well it happened! So I started writing to give enough back story to make it believable that someone would actually do such stupid things.)

I will probably do an afterword or foreword or something to bring it into my present perspective on things. I’m still too involved in it to do that at the moment.

Re-editing…

On writing, Uncategorized, ,

I’m going thru the War Journal again, re-editing all the chapters and pieces, opening everything up to public, thinking about some kind of approach to publishing it all.

Not sure what direction I’ll take, but am open to suggestions.

I came across this bit that I like a lot, so thought I’d put it out here, maybe entice some casual readers to delve into the whole thing. This is from “Desperado Connection” – Ch. 3 of The Trip, the story of my cross-country odyssey with another vet:

“Yeah, I had been ready to go, get out of Florida, get out of the country maybe. Hell, I’d been wanting to go to Canada since graduation – probably should’a gone – so why not? It had been easy to take Charlie’s suggestion. I was lost in my thoughts now, lost in the anger, half-scrubbing at the counter, absently putting away pots and pans…. I don’t even want to stay in this country any more, not after what it’s done to us. Disemboweled, that’s the word. The War, and what they’ve done to everybody so they could keep having the war, it’s all just spiritually disemboweled us. That’s why we feel so empty. We eat and drink and smoke and snort and it all just blasts out the bottom. There’s nothing there, so we just keep moving. Blow it out your ass, the jet jockeys loved to say. That’s what we’re doing. Just like that F-4 jock that lost it in the O-Club at DaNang, jumped up on the bar and started shooting up all the mirrors and the bottles with his Smith & Wesson .38 Caliber Combat Masterpiece, the sidearm we all carried so we could get rescued or otherwise if we crashed in the jungle. Blowing it out his ass, they said.”

An Introduction…

On writing

I have significantly revised the Introduction, so I’m posting it here for those who may have begun reading earlier without the benefit of an introduction!

[The Pages listed in the dropdown are the chapters/pieces of my book, which is now complete except for this Introduction, though all are still subject to revision and possible reordering. I will try to note in posts if I change anything.]

A War Journal

My Encounter with Empire: Vietnam

INTRODUCTION

In the first half of the 20th Century, the United States began to dabble in the affairs of a tiny country in Southeast Asia known as Vietnam. The French spent a number of years there, learning much of the iron will of the Viet people before they decided to leave. The US, imbued with great optimism and hubris about its military prowess, jumped in behind the French, first with advisers and later with troops.

The intervention became, famously, a quagmire. By the mid-sixties, most everyone who wasn’t blind or biased realized that the US involvement there was unwise, but the political and military realities of the country, its inclination toward Empire, kept us plodding along through this foolishness for almost another decade.

I had the misfortune to be dragged into this conflagration by virtue of my age and social status, so in 1968, I found myself enlisting in the US Air Force, despite my distaste for the US invasion of Vietnam, and despite my opposition to war and aversion to the military in general.

What follows is the story of how I came to be in the Air Force, a bit of what it was like being in SEA during the declining years of ‘The War’ that wasn’t really a war, how I eventually got out, and what the effects of it all were on me. In addition, it is the story of another Vietnam era veteran with whom I became friends and journeyed across the US in search of some kind of absolution.

Before you begin reading the book, a few words of warning are in order! Though this introduction is incomplete, it may help with reading the book:

This is an experimental work and so asks of the reader a bit of work and patience.

This is written as creative non-fiction, so it’s true, in the sense that all these things actually happened, just maybe not exactly as I’ve written it, due to the vagaries of memory or the needs of the story.

It is a multi-genre work, which means it includes straight narrative, stories, journal entries, re-created journal entries, poems, songs, graphics, news accounts, quotations from other works, and pieces in other voices both real and imaginary. All these various genre pieces are intended to work together to tell the story and paint the picture of my experience; some of them may stand alone as individual pieces as well.

This work employs an exploded timeline – thus each entry is dated to help you keep the sequence clear. There are two main streams, however: the first is the time prior to and during my service in the Air Force (most of these have a date in the title), and the second is a trip that I took with another vet about a year after I got out of the Air Force. (The pieces in the Trip sequence are numbered as Chapters in the list.) The story more or less alternates between these two streams, with some exceptions… This serves to juxtapose various elements of the story in ways that would not happen in a straight, time-order narrative.

Good luck! And thanks again for your willingness to undertake this journey.

[If you don’t have the password for the protected pieces, leave a comment, include your email address or other contact info, and I’ll get in touch.

Thanks for being willing to read this. If you have questions, please leave a comment. I would appreciate comments on the story and the format – please be honest, and try to be kind…. As Miss Erika Badu said, “I’m a artist and I’m sensitive about my shit!”]

 

Done?

On writing,

Well, it’s pretty much done.

I think all the pieces are here now. Just finished the Epilog, and posted the final chapter of the Trip sequence last night. I suppose I should write an introduction or something, but I need some space from this part to do that.

Also just updated the Theme, which changes the way the site looks but keeps the functioning pretty much the same, so if you’ve been here before and wonder why it looks different… it is!

I am sure it needs much editing and revising yet, but it’s all here now. I would appreciate comments on the multi-genre approach and how that works for you. There may be things I need to do to make it work better, read easier, be clearer, but I’m pretty happy and pretty committed to the multi-genre approach. I feel this format creates juxtapositions of various elements of the story that don’t happen in a straight narrative… but I’m open to suggestion/discussion about modifications  to make things clearer.

As I said in the beginning, it’s been a hell of ride. But I feel good about it… whatever comes of it, it’s out there. I will begin going back thru making read-throughs and taking out the password restrictions where they still stand. So let me know what you think.

Thanks for hanging with me.

Writing as sculpture

On writing,

Writing is much like sculpture.

You have all these grand ideas in your head as to how the thing will look, or read, and that it will be beautiful and flowing… but the process of realizing them is a slow chipping away, tiny modifications, tedious re-working and re-working…

In sculpture, one of the hardest parts is getting the piece you’re working on strapped down and solid so that you can carve or chip on it without it moving around. The technical setup for writing is much like that as well… WordPress has this new feature, ‘distraction-free writing mode’, which seems to help with some of that, but there are always the technical issues to be resolved, getting things to come out in the right order, keeping up with which is the most current version of any given piece… on and on.

But I have slogged thru quite a few of the issues with the last several bits of this wannabe book, so that it’s mostly in the right order and close to final form. There are still lots of pieces yet to come, but the end is near!