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The Things They Carried

Written by Sady on April 12th, 2010

BHS and Queensborough Community College hosted a reading and discussion last Saturday of Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, a collection of short stories about a platoon of American soldiers in the Vietnam War.  This event was part of The Big Read, an initiative of the National Endowment for the Arts designed to encourage reading and cultural conversation.

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Joseph Giannini, Joan Furey, and Anthony Wallace, three veterans featured in BHS’s exhibit In Our Own Words: Portraits of Brooklyn Vietnam Veterans, read from their own writings and generously shared stories about their experiences in Vietnam, coming home, coping with post-traumatic stress, and what they continue to carry emotionally.

Listen to excerpts from the event:

Michele Cuomo and Anida Pobric from Queensborough Community College read from O’Brien’s story “Good Form”

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Joan Furey talks about her experiences as a nurse in the Post-OP/ICU at the 71st Evacuation Hospital in Pleiku, Vietnam 1969 – 1970, what it was like to work in a regular hospital in the U.S. after that experience, and she reads from her book Visions of War, Dreams of Peace, an anthology of poetry and prose by women who served in Vietnam co-edited with Linda VanDevanter.

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Joseph Giannini commanded a rifle platoon that was part of the Special Landing Force in Vietnam, he talks about loosing half his platoon, how surfing helped him begin to heal, parallels between his experiences and what men and women currently serving in Iraq and Afghanistan are going through, and he reads an excerpt from a short story he wrote called “Interval”.

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Anthony Wallace entered the military in 1969, he talks about why he chose to enter Noncommissioned Officers school, and describes the 90+ pounds of equipment and supplies he carried in his rucksack, as well as the memories and emotions he carries with him after surviving an attack that left 25 US wounded and seven dead.

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Anthony, Joseph, and Joan talk about their experiences Coming Home from war:

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More comments and questions about women in the military:

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John Wayne

Written by Sady on September 10th, 2008

Last night, BHS screened John Wayne’s The Green Berets (1968), the first film in the series Cinema of the Vietnam War that we are co-hosting with Brooklyn For Peace.

What a cultural artifact!  One of the Vietnam veterans in the audience said it was like a 2.5 hour long recruitment movie, and that’s a good description.  Marilyn Young, author of The Vietnam Wars who lead a discussion with the audience, noted that John Wayne actually got permission from President Johnson to make the film on a military base in Georgia.  They were given access to all kinds of military equipment – and that was actually the most interesting part for me, having heard many personal stories about Vietnam I was finally able to see what a claymore mine looks like (bigger than I thought) and get a better sense of helicopter travel (although much disbelief must be suspended to believe that Georgian woods are Southeast Asian jungle).

The pro-war film was a box office hit (in 1968!), which makes it even more disturbing to watch John Wayne’s iconic, macho, and irresponsible response to death: a brief drop of his eyebrows, and then he’s over it.  One particularly saccharine and out-of-touch moment I noticed was a soldier wearing his green beret over the gauze wrapping a headwound he suffered during a mortar attack; a tight, sweaty wool beret over clean bandages?  Suffice to say, the Communist Threat was as alive and well in John Wayne’s imagination in 1968 as it was in Joseph McCarthy’s in 1950 – and we can all feel confident that U.S. will win the war as we watch the amber sun setting beautifully over the Pacific Ocean which, by the way, is on the eastern coast of Vietnam.

The film is such an anachronism, even for 1968, I won’t even bother to go into how they depict women who put themselves at physical risk for their country.

Watch The Green Berets Trailer

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