MILSPEAK BOOKS LATEST Title MEMORIAL DAY 2012 NOW AVAILABLE! A COMMON BOND II Poetry, Prose, and Song By Participants of The Memorial Day Writers’ Project In Tribute to America’s Veterans 1993-2011 Produced by the Memorial Day Writers’ Project Edited by Richard Epstein https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/165160shapeimage_1_link_0
 
About The Memorial Day Writers Project (MDWP) Mission Statement We are Veterans and we are writers, musicians, and artists. We are a collective of friends, some veterans, some not, all of whom were formed or affected by the crucible of war. We gather to share our creative talents through public readings, performances, and other endeavors. The Memorial Day Writers’ Project (MDWP) is a non-profit, non-political, and has no affiliation with any religious group or movement. Our purpose is to create, educate, share and inform ourselves and those who gather with us. We are warriors and fellow travelers of a certain kind: we have no enemy except tyranny; we abhor it in any guise and seek to free what it enslaves¾ heal what it despoils. Our weapons are our hearts and our minds. Project Goals The goals of The Memorial Day Writers Project are: To continue to memorialize and remember those men and women who sacrificed themselves in Wars¾not only the Vietnam War, but all Wars, world-wide. To deliver a personal and unromanticized message about War and its aftermath. To provide public educational forums and performance venues for those who have yet to be heard, as well as for those who wish to hear. To participate in public educational forums and performance venues sponsored by others and with others who respect our right of free expression as we respect theirs. To promote and foster the creative and educational process among the collective group and among those who have been touched by or in contact with the MDWP. To offer a positive and conciliatory legacy in the aftermath of the Vietnam War to our generation and to the generations that follow. Contact Information For more information see our website at www.memorialdaywritersproject.com or contact MMCdon5808@aol.com or dick_epstein@hotmail.com Excerpts from A COMMON BOND II Mike McDonell Mike served as supply and logistics officer for Headquarters, Eleventh Marines, and as a duty officer and patrol leader with the First Marine Division’s Northern Sector Defense Command from 1967-1968 in I Corps. He retired after thirty-four years of Federal service as a writer/editor and public information specialist. Mike lives with his wife Suellen and spends his time teaching, traveling, and writing. Mike is co-founder of The Memorial Day Writers’ Project. From the Wall Xin Loy, Charlie No sweat, buddy Miss you, honey Love you, Mom Guess I’ll never catch up with you, Dad Guess I’ll always be nineteen Heard the one about the Grunt and the NVA? Grunt was sitting in his hole, watching tracers stitch the dark in red and green over the roar of incoming and outgoing Grunt yelled “Ho Chi Minh is a son of a bitch” and not very far away a voice replied: “LBJ is a running dog’s bastard” That’s not all: the next day they find the grunt and the NVA dead in the middle of the road locked in a bear-hug and grinning at the magic moment that the deuce and a half rolled over them, at the very moment of their agreement and celebration well before the pin-heads and cookie-pushers had settled on the shape of the negotiating table True war story: circa 1967-68 First Marine Division TAOR I Corps RVN It may have happened on the Cua Viet or at the mouth of the A Shau the Hai Van or the Dinh Ban Passes come to mind or maybe it was Nui Loc Son in April during Union or a month later during Union II but it sure as hell happened by Tet of 68 when the Fifth took Hue and the boys on both sides took shit at Khe Sanh Truth be told, it might have even happened to a doggie in Cholon by the race track (just him and Nguyen) or an airman, or a sailor, or a nurse Could have been a Donut Dolly and all her counterparts, they all had names like Van, and Tran, and Trung, and Nam but only the Ghost Gunny knows for sure and he’s not talking any more today. But maybe tonight... Gretchen Sullivan Gretchen is the daughter of a Vietnam veteran who served from '67 to'68 with the 1st Marine Aircraft Wing, Headquarters and Maintenance Squadron-13, MAG-13, in Chu Lai, Vietnam. In her own words: "As the child of a Vietnam vet, I felt like Vietnam was in my bones from the time that I was a little kid. In my family, some of my dad's stories were whispered or not spoken of at all, and some of them were stories that were with us, overtly, all the time.   All my life, I've grilled him for all the details of his Vietnam stories. No matter how hard the telling is, he always tells me. I don't want those stories to be lost. Even when the stories are brutal, as they often are, I feel like it's my job to tell the truth - whatever ambivalence or pain that may reveal. I think of my work as poetry of witness - writing that tries to tell the truth of horrific events, in the hope that we will never forget those events, and in the hope that no one after us will have to suffer in the same way.
 I'm indebted to my father, to all of his Vietnam buddies, and to all of the amazing vets I've met along the way, for entrusting me with their stories. I won't ever know what they've known first-hand, but I'm honored to be a part of their family. I hope that the work I do with language and poetry always serves vets, as they served us, and always offers both a recognition of what they live through on a daily basis, and a vision for thanks, healing, and peace." Brotherhood Tet, Chu Lai, January 1968. Eddie "Tomatoes" D'Amato drags your stoned ass from the hootch down into the open bunker when the VC drop a rocket on your bomb dump. You'd missed the rocket's suck through air, sat mesmerized in the flash, concussions like music. This ain't no fucking fireworks, Tommy. He hauls you by the band of your skivvies, grateful, later, under the lip of dirt, that you wasted time to grab the flask. The GAF bunker, you'd called it, for give a fuck. After Tet, you and Tomatoes cover it with runway matting and sandbags. Three months later, on night supply with Tomatoes, stoned in the early morning, the rockets hit again. You run across the sand under fire, crab-wise, back to supply from the bunker to find Eddie's cigarettes and a canteen of coffee. A brother knows what a brother needs to keep him from shitting his pants. Later, you remember these small things: whiskey, cigarettes, coffee, heat of bodies in a bunker. Not so small. Thomas, geminus, twin. D'Amato, amare, to love. The Eye I was not the man on the ground belly-down to the jungle bugs and the dirt soaked with rain and blood. I was not the man who humped the dead and near-dead through night paddies. I was not the man at My Lai; I did not break for lunch and eat slowly so bound fathers could watch their wounded daughters die in ditches at my feet. No, I was only the air man, the drop boy, Vietnam a sponge of green under the chopper. I just threw their food, their guns, my own gun rusted to my hip. But I saw the hootches burning. I watched them kill the children and animals when all the men and women were dead. Ron Capps Ron Capps, Director of the Veterans Writing Project, was a soldier for 25 years and has spent time with special operations forces in central Africa, a combat tour in Afghanistan, and as an international peacekeeper in Darfur. Ron served as a Foreign Service officer from 1994-2008 with postings in Kosovo, Rwanda, Iraq, and Sudan. Ron works as a freelance writer and directs the Veterans Writing Project, a non-profit organization that provides no-cost writing seminars and workshops for veterans in the Washington metro area. This following is an excerpt from his upcoming memoir The French Lieutenant's iPod: Stories from a Dozen Years of War. Deus ex Machina Faking it. That's what I'm doing every day when people blithely ask, "How are you?" What would they do if I said, "Well, Kristen, now that you ask, I'm a complete mess. I have these visions of dead people in my head and I can't feel my hands sometimes. And you know, I think pretty soon I'm going to collapse into a pile of quivering goo. Of course, that's if I don't start wearing a tinfoil tiara and proclaiming that the TV is emitting death rays, first. But enough about me, how are you?" What would they say? Of course I'm not going to say that. No one really wants to know how you feel when he or she asks. So I say, "All Right, you?" and keep moving, wringing my hands and staring at the ground hoping to hell no one speaks to me or sits with me at breakfast expecting me to make polite conversation. That's how things are these days. I'm in Afghanistan and my brain is broken. I have to decide what to do: go to treatment and risk my job or keep faking it and risk my guys' lives. It sucks, but is what it is. There aren't any other options. There is no deus ex machina to come down from the rafters and solve this because this is not a Greek tragedy. It's is my puny little personal catastrophe and no god will come down to explain why things are just so magnificently screwed up inside my head. No god will come to explain why I am forced to sit fecklessly by as these horrible, repulsive pictures fester in my head and shackle my sway over my thoughts and my dreams - while all the while the world goes rolling merrily by and everyone is just so fucking chirpy and buoyant. Man, I am up to here with chirpy. Don't these people know about the ones who were murdered? What about the ones who were burned, raped, humiliated, tortured? No, I guess they don't remember, the Chirpy Bastards. Is it just me who feels this way? Maybe the Chirpy Bastards do know about the killings and burnings and rapes and everyone else in the whole world can just process this stuff better than I can. Maybe I am just some freak show repository for the carny House of Horrors. Maybe my brain is stuck in the on position while the Records Division plays and replays the same hideous stacks of snuff porn on the jumbotron in my brain. And now I have the wonderful option of taking medication that can make me feel better so I can do my job but - and this is the Catch 22 of this generation's war - if I take the medication I can lose my security clearance and I'll lose my job and my house. Nice goddam choice: crazy or homeless. Am I destined to lie awake in bed all night rocking with these horrible pictures flashing on the drive-in movie screen of my mind? Yeah way up there on the big screen, on a screen as big as a prairie so you can't just blink and make it go away. Way up there, on the Big Board in Technicolor and Panavision and Stereoscope, it's filled with big and garish and loud and violent awfulness. It's wide-angle everything I hate and fear as big as Mount Rushmore. It's a million gigabytes of pixilated gimlet mayhem blurring out the rest of the stuff in my head and it's rocking on full-auto. It looks like unadulterated hell like it's straight out of a Hieronymus Bosch painting on acid, like Disney's evil twin Skippy made something really special just for me. Oh, and it's a babe gone bad; it's crude and vulgar and it's so horny for me that it's licking its lips like a junkie whore aching for a hit. And all I can do is lie there curled up in a ball like a worthless little shit, dreading the dawn because it means I'll have to get up and face the world but hating the dark because it's in the dark where all these things hide. And after the day comes another night and the dark just means I'll have to do this all over again with the pictures all up there on the drive-in movie screen. Damn. Or I can take the medication and lose my house. For Christ's sake, I'm not going to be homeless, am I? Will I end up like those people on the street begging for change, talking to the satellites and jamming to the music of the spheres? Did they start off seeing pictures in their dreams that made them not want to go to sleep? Did they start off hiding from their friends so they wouldn't have to talk to the Chirpy Bastards? So, no shit, is this the beginning of a major league downward spiral where I start with a great wife and a job I love and a house in the suburbs but I end up preaching to crack dealers on street corners in neighborhoods where the cops don't care about just another sick puppy who's wearing clothes out of the lending closet at the COGIC while chattering to himself about conspiracy theories and listening to The Voices? Is this just some lame-ass chemical imbalance or is this Fortuna getting me back for not chipping a buck to the guy on the corner every day? Is that where I'm headed, for a long downspin on the wheel? Well what about the change I used give to the street trumpeter in Montreal? What about the bags of food to the street mamas in Kigali? Or the clothes and the carpet and the refrigerator I gave to the guys who lost their houses in Prishtina? Don't those count? Don't I get some points for those? Or is it just my turn for a downward spin on Fortuna's wheel? Well if that's it, ok, let's rock and roll. Let's get it on, baby! I want to go with it and get it over with and get my goddam life back. I'm sick of this. I'm sick of feeling like I'm mostly dead, like I just inhabit this body in some god- awful 1950's sci-fi B movie. I'm sick of avoiding the Chirpy Bastards. I'm sick of shaking and rolling up into a ball on the floor for a good cry when these pictures come to me in the middle of the night. But some days are better than others. Some days I feel pretty good. Some days I really do feel All Right. But on those days I wonder what All Right is. How long has it been since I really was All Right. How long have I been like this? What does All Right really feel like? Is it just not feeling like you just got off the three-night red-eye from Kyrgyzstan? Is it just that you can feel your hands and arms and you don't feel like someone in your family just died? Is it just sleeping through the night? Is it just having a funny or sexy or weird dream without having burned bodies and Kalashnikovs in supporting roles? Well, sometimes I do feel like that. Sometimes I do feel All Right. Sometimes I can look at other people and want to talk with them, to listen to their stories and tell them mine. Sometimes I do laugh at jokes. Sometimes I think I can write a funny song or a pretty song on my guitar instead of jeremiads about loss or abandonment or drinking yourself to death. Sometimes I feel so good I can look at a young woman - ok, let's be realistic, a 30-year-old - and think, if I hold her glance for just a moment, that maybe she likes older guys instead of wondering if she's just freaked out because she can see all the screwed up stuff that spins around in my head like out-takes from an Exorcist movie. Sometimes I do feel like that. Some days are better than others. A COMMON BOND II is available for download at https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/165160 http://www.memorialdaywritersproject.com/http://www.memorialdaywritersproject.commailto:MMCdon5808@aol.commailto:dick_epstein@hotmail.comhttps://www.smashwords.com/books/view/165160https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/165160shapeimage_2_link_0shapeimage_2_link_1shapeimage_2_link_2shapeimage_2_link_3shapeimage_2_link_4shapeimage_2_link_5