Contents shows the 57 with their page #s under 4 subtitles: In the Half Light; Fifty Different Tulips; Learning Their Names; Weight and Wings. A subtitle page introduces each of these 4 sections of 12, 17, 15, and 13 poems.

Each of Mishah Zadeh’s illustrations is a unique work referring graphically to her title page for the whole collection. The poet’s subtitles refer obliquely to that section’s poems.

Those of In the Half-Light are not dimly lit. But the poem Singing the Citadel ends its final fit ‘Street’ with the line Alone in the half-light, I listen for song.

Those of Fifty Different Tulips number only 17. But the third sentence of the poem Eden Revisited reads: Fifty different tulips, set to bud in orderly spectra, undone by common buttercups.

8 of the 15 poems in Learning Their Names unambiguously show acquisition of nouns. Science Experiment begins I hated learning to spell their names.

That poem and Translation and Assembly Diagram and Gingham and The Wordsmith’s Apprentice and Xuân and a.k.a. and Hearing a Song for the Second Time all have to do directly with names, noms, nouns in immigrant life and primary through university classrooms but the other 7, nearly half, don’t.

Just more than half, 7 of the 13 poems of the final section Weight and Wing directly address gravitation or airfoils. The next to last poem, Ground Zero, ends: How we dream ourselves, tiptoe on the open ledge, making perfect counterpoise of weight and wing, one calling its elements back to the core, the other surging sure and skyward to a higher kind of grace.

Tell all the truth but tell it slant, Emily Dickinson advised herself. If Kim-An Lieberman wanted to dictate a message with her subtitles and their poems she would have sent a telegram.

Faxed us. Wrote a letter as Emily wrote and sent dozens of notes each week in Amherst where the mail came and went 4 times a day.

Kim-An could have sent an email. Texted. Instead she worked with others to make a book of her poems.

They share a family resemblance. All the poems are thick with verbs.

The 21 lines of the first, title poem use 21 verbs: began, took, slid, spurted, consulted, broadcast, buzzed, donated, hoisted, volunteered, distributed, stationed, unzipped, think, tossed, hopped, discarding, held, tore, remaining, and waved.

Of the 21 only 2 speak in the passive voice: broadcast and consulted. Of all 57 poems, just 8 contain a passive construction, all but 1 of those just the 1.

When only 1 poem, Invocation, uses more than 1 passive, Hanoi, you are lost in traffic,

the poem then draws attention with a second passive, Hanoi, you are lost in traffic and karaoke, are swallowed by the summer monsoon.

Then the third and final verb of the series switches to active: Hanoi, you are lost in traffic and karaoke, are swallowed by the summer monsoon, are blossoming flames in October.

The poet’s linking verbs as well as that passive construction suggest action. 29 poems have 1 or 2 instances of the verb to be and no poem in the book uses an empty link like appear, become, or seem.

When only 1 poem, Gingham, uses to be as a linking verb more than twice it throws down 8 copulas, starting: We are children and it is always summer.

The use of to be in the present tense when speaking of the past in that poem captures the helplessness of a shameful memory from childhood. That’s an adult although arrested remembering.

Counting just verbs not just poems, the poet’s speech is overwhelmingly indicative. Over the whole book 22 poems of 57 use the present indicative only.

11 more use the past indicative only. 4 more use both the past and present indicative.

Only 1 poem, a.k.a., uses the future tense even once. 3 use the indicative with the imperative, 4 with the infinitive, and 12 with the subjunctive.

In total, 20 poems conjure the contrary to fact at all, while 37 of the 57 report only what has happened or what is happening, as if matters of fact.

The poet speaks most often in the third person, observing and reporting. 38 poems use the third person.

I was surprised to count so many as 22 using the second person, of address, and 28 in the first person, of testimony, at all. Looking at poems that use verbs only in 1 person, there are 8 of the first and 6 of the second but 17 of the third person, more than those of the first and second combined.

I have caught errors in my counts by 1 or 2 so chances are that errors of that magnitude remain. I have caught transcription errors when they didn’t add up.

The poet’s speech varies as appropriate around a core of direct expression, invention, and observation. It is the fancy dress of plain English.

Oliver Wendell Holmes the father and medical doctor wrote like that. Speak clearly if you speak at all; carve every word before you let it fall.

His son Oliver Wendell the high justice wrote like that too. As I grow older I grow calm.

So did the psychologist William James. Belief creates the actual fact.

His brother Henry the novelist did too, as you count the sequins of his sequences: he knew all its points and would tell you just where to stand to see them in combination and just the hour when the shadows of its various protuberances—which fell so softly upon the warm, weary brickwork—were of the right measure.

Men in charge making sense. As did the insurance lawyer Wallace Stevens: nothing himself, beholds nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

And Emily in charge of her own English and her own sense: you cannot solder an abyss with air.

At mid-life Emily copied out her poems onto sheets of paper she gathered and folded into booklets she sewed shut and stowed in a box by her bed. When she died her brother’s lover took poems out of those fascicles to arrange into books.

Kim-An instead put herself out there like Emily had sent letters, into life. Kim-An submitted poems to editors at magazines, winning publication.

Her collection of 4 sections won a book prize in 2008 at Blue Begonia Press who published Breaking the Map that same year. The manuscript must have gone as directly into proof as a book can do.

The distribution of the poems by shape on the page is like that of their verbs by sense. There is a central tendency with outliers.

Of the 57 poems, 49 fit on 1 page only. Each of the other 8 fits by length on only 2 pages.

Width varies from 1 to 4 inches, plus or minus 1 quarter inch, 2 with lines as long as 9 inches broken to fit the page.

The 8 poems that each fit on only 2 pages are in 3 of the 4 sections, no 2 such poems abutting. In the Half-Light has 2.

Singing the Citadel stands in 4 titled stanzas displayed across 2 pages at once, left and right. Eyes to the Earth runs over its recto almost halfway through the third sentence of the fourth stanza.

Fifty Different Tulips has 3. Appleseed is another confident display of couplets on 1 and 1 half pages.

Then Roadside Bar, Athens runs onto verso between a period and a capital rather than in mid-sentence as Eyes to Earth does. Wings, a set piece of Kim-An’s public readings, could have been a magnificent display on left and right.

Instead it rattles on from the first page over the second like a reading script no audience will see. The stanzas could instead have suggested the pair of wings her husband grows.

Every line is a run-on with a hanging bit that could have been feathers. Surely Kim-An or typesetter Karen Bodeen thought of that then decided it would be tacky.

It would have been ekphrastic.

Learning Their Names has 2 poems of 2 pages. The five chapters of Chuyện Của Bà/My Grandmother’s Stories, left and right justified, march with the dignity of prose on a memorial down 1 recto and onto the other side.

School Choir Trip to Juneau, the eighth poem of 2 pages, just runs out of space for the final 3 lines of 1/2 and 2 sentences. Them’s the breaks.

The coherence of Kim-An’s words, how they hang together in a poem, on the page, and throughout a book, found in Misha Zadeh a bold illustrator and in Karen Bodeen a careful typesetter. These words had made their way to Blue Begonia Press in Yakima, capital of the orchards where migrant poets like Carlos Bulosan and natives like Raymond Carver and our own David A. Willson and my brother and sister-in-law labored.

Blue Begonia secured endorsements for the back cover from Shawn Wong, pioneer of an Asian American literature — she makes us a witness more than a reader — and Kathleen Flenniken, later the second poet laureate of Washington — the mundane is magnified by language that is startling, and exquisitely precise — and Samuel Green, the first laureate of the state, incumbent when the book appeared, a bookman as well as poet — this is a geography that demands attention.

What each says makes sense that a reader may paraphrase, unusual in any poetry collection’s blurbs, and the 3 make replicable sense together. Kim-An’s active indicative third persons on 1 page with outliers indeed let the reader witness the mundane magnified by language into a geography.

Witness what geography? The word means the surface of the crust of this planet as well as its abstraction as on a map.

The university profession of geography researches and teaches the 2 together. 1 of my favorite Viet Nam scholars, dead young, was a geographer at the University of Washington where the poet earned her bachelor’s degree.

He married a woman with 2 Vietnamese grandmothers. The Viet Nam in Kim-An’s poems fits with that of our Vietnamese studies and lives, map and terrain like the hundred songs that praise every city in Vietnam in every season, every age.

Breaking the Map is the title of its poem. That title is not the first line, as we use to refer to Emily’s poems, and the phrase does not appear in its poem.

I have not found any titles of the book in their poem. But only 1 poem comes first and only 1 poem gives its title to the book.

Most poets in Kim-An’s orbit more often title their collections obliquely. A reader may search each 1 for the reference as I did for those of Kim-An’s sections.

Instead she named her first book for a poem and put it first, as if to say, listen up. I take it that the poem Breaking the Map tells how to read the book Breaking the Map.

These instructions are baffling though direct, as when Emily wrote the way I read a letter’s this ‘tis first I lock the door then sewed the poem shut and put it in a box.

They began with a giant carbide ripsaw at the designated parallel.
The course was fibrous and deeply stratified.

The map we witness breaking in Kim-An’s title poem has a scale of 0 to 1, all terrain. A ripsaw cuts with the grain.

They are cutting a parallel like the latitude that in 1954 created the 2 Viet Nams which no Vietnamese government agreed to. The United States Americans who drew the line used map at a scale of 1 to 50,000 with almost no terrain.

Rivers, disconnected, spurted erratically from both ends.

Sounds like a B-52 strike right? Except it is a party, a national party.

The project was broadcast live on national radio.

Which nation?

Helicopters buzzed overhead.

Ah. Helicopters. Those were in Saigon’s republic only, also tanks, until Kim-An was born 20 years after Geneva.

Local hardware stores donated tools by the truckload.

That would be in our big-box USA, although loaded trucks sound like the supply line from Ha Noi to the war on Saigon. But tools and trucks came from Beijing and Moscow, not locally sourced.

Entire villages volunteered.

Those would be Catholic parishes heading south in 1954. Then strategic hamlets of the Saigon republic who got volunteered to resettle.

Then the villages of Ha Noi where all the men marched south and vanished. I can carry on like this reading my map in her poem.

I am not wrong. But the poet is right:

Children distributed free lemonade. Grandparents stationed lawn chairs on either side. As the gap unzipped, landowners on the divide had to think fast. Brothers tossed coins for the better half. Lovers hopped across together, discarding their own lives.

What? All I can say is that she is breaking the map. I don’t understand Emily either.

Kim-An’s family wrote in their obituary that she was of “Jewish American” and Vietnamese descent, in command of English, French, and Vietnamese language. She earned a doctorate in English and taught at every level from kindergarten through college.

Everything else I know about the woman comes from reading her poems. I take it, for instance, that her grandmother was from northern Viet Nam because she made the square bánh chưng for the new year, not the round southern bánh tét.

I guess, for instance, that someone whose family calls her Jewish American was not a Jew born to a Jewish mother. Still, whether or not her mother had converted already she gave birth to the poet in Providence, Rhode Island and Plantations where we have congregated across as many centuries as the Protestants.

I was already born nearby in New Haven, Connecticut, another Jewish city. I would love to have met the poet and heard of her Jewish American life.

I notice and respect that she makes no use of scripture in this book, oh maybe Eden Revisited. Her principal myth is that of Daedalus and Icarus in Roadside Bar, Athens and Wings.

Moreover I don’t hear any Yiddish construction or inflection in her speech at all, go figure. I do see school French in her reliance on forceful grammar and exact vocabulary to make sense with individual verve.

I have shown above how I also see the fanciest of English. It is not the style of her English departments at Seattle and Berkeley in service to peer review.

She writes as we do when born and raised in charge, like the Adams’ and Dickinsons and Holmes’ and James’ and Stevens once upon a time in our native New England. In Seattle Kim-An Lieberman was in charge of the future, a teacher hired and promoted and remembered for teaching at one of the schools where grownups educate children we intend to govern us when our lives have broken the map.

Above is the 2 hundred and sixty-third Viet Nam letter since that of February 9, 2022, below.

Viet Nam Literature Project (VNLP) publishes these Viet Nam letters. VNLP is the d/b/a of Books & Authors: Viet Nam, Inc.

We incorporated in 1997 in North Carolina, United States of America. The Secretary of State of North Carolina has listed us as a non-profit in this state since that year.

The Internal Revenue Service of the USA first recognized Books & Authors: Viet Nam, Inc. as a Schedule 501(c)(3) charitable organization in February, 1998. The IRS then confirmed that status twice by letters of March 8, 2005 and March 20, 2009.

Viet Nam letters respects the property of others under paragraph 107 of United States Code Title 17. We explain our policy at length in the letter of September 12, 2022.

The book Breaking the Map and its title poem are copyright © 2008 by Kim-An Lieberman. We have reached out through the late poet’s website and the published telephone number of her publisher to discuss any rights issue raised by our critical work on Kim-An’s poem and their book.

We have not yet made contact. Would a representative of the rights holder drop me a line at <editor@vietnamlit.org>?

The colophon of these Viet Nam letters, directly above, shows the janitor speaking with poet David A. Willson on a Veterans Day.

That is a new book by a friend of mine. It shipped 7 weeks ago, May 5, arriving here in Durham that same day.

I shall first read the book’s jacket to say what I see. You might not already be a friend of ours, those United States Americans who tell stories in English about war for Viet Nam.

That title refers to How to Tell a True War Story by Tim O’Brien, an original gangster in our thing. His first book (1973) had worked up his war diary.

Tim’s third book (1978) is a fantasy of an infantryman walking away from the war to Paris, told by his lieutenant leading their platoon after him. Those 2 came out before and just after my first literature review (1977) on that war in my third year of high school.

Both books confirmed my teen-age judgement that to read and write in English in the United States of America about war in Viet Nam was to walk into a funhouse, a hall of mirrors. This old man still agrees with that boy.

How Tell a True War Story is a chapter in Tim’s fifth book (1990), 1 of the 4 out of his oeuvre of 10 total that voice an abiding concern with bullshit. That is, by the way, the great theme of his peers in Vietnamese language as well.

The author cares about difficulties of instead telling the truth that a number of us born about the same year (1960) as Bob and I have addressed since the fall of Saigon (1975). How Tell a True War Story addresses rather those who have not already read and taught and written works of ethnography and history, endeavors of organized credulity and skepticism.

I have found Tim fustian and jejune on his topic since his war diary while I have enjoyed his powers of imagination since the one about going after Cacciato. Oh, since we here are concerned with truth, let me tell you what I really think.

Tim is one of our best, bright as a box of hammers just as I expect a celebrated author in English about that Vietnamese war to be. He is a Harvard graduate such as got us in over there and wouldn’t leave because they didn’t think things through.

This Is a True War Story has startled and intrigued me with its reference to How to Tell a True War Story. I say Tim has never done any such thing, that he doesn’t have it in him.

That is his theme both in the work that I have enjoyed and those that have irritated me. Robert K. Brigham already has told many true war stories.

Bob and I made friends over bagels and coffee and flashcards before each day’s Vietnamese class at Cornell University, host to the Southeast Asia Studies Summer Institute that year (1991). We each had arrived at the same time at the same determination to start using that language.

There are a number, an unknown positive integer I estimate on the order of 10 to the second because I have met a couple dozen, of native speakers of English just our age, give or take, who made that decision. Think about it.

We each were in latency, when the child turns from the mother and awakens to the world, for several of the 10 years starting in 1965. That is, from the escalation of the war on the ground in the Republic of Viet Nam, all over the papers across the USA twice a day, and every night on television in the living room with the box score, our dead and theirs.

Those black and white pictures were important to us. Bob and I did not meet learning Bru or Hmong or Khmer or Lao or Thai, languages of the secret war without illustrations or movies.

Isaac Tobin’s cover design captures what happened to our heads. Look at that lovely post-1945 United States American child, alert, nourished, all his teeth.

Shot through his eyes, like the black bars in an old-time photograph of a vice raid, is a contact sheet from the United States Marine Corps’ battle for Hue City. Yup, that’s what happened to me and my Viet Nam war buddies back home.

But of our total cohort (b. 1960-65), on the order of 10 to the eighth, only a small minority continued to pay attention after 1975 to our war for Viet Nam let alone to that other country. Of us a tiny fraction have learned as an adult to use even French.

What happened to Bob? What were we doing with our bagels, coffee, and flashcards?

Robert K. Brigham is going to tell us. The book jacket’s subtitle reads: My improbable history with Vietnam.

The person who composed that subtitle is not an actuary writing for the statistically sound. The probability of Bob’s history with Vietnam is 1 hundred per cent.

That is, it already has happened. But chances are that the interested browser of a trade book from a university press has only an average command of probability.

So they open the book to the front flap of the dust jacket and read:

A PERSONAL ACCOUNT BY A WAR HISTORIAN AND ADOPTEE WHO DISCOVERS HIS BIOLOGICAL FATHER WAS A FAMOUS MARINE COMBAT PHOTOGRAPHER IN VIETNAM.

Whether improbable or over-determined the author’s history with Vietnam is arresting. It lays a hand on your shoulder.

You stand stunned. It is astonishing.

It was unheard of and remains unforgettable. That’s a man you don’t meet every day.

Furthermore, Robert K. Brigham has had a substantial career as a historian of the Vietnam War, with a hand in nine books, a documentary, public history projects, and more.

Led, I would say rather than had. Pioneered, like the men who march at the front of the Foreign Legion with an ax to remove obstacles for those who come after.

When we were flipping flashcards (1991) you couldn’t have had a career as a historian of the Vietnam War. The Organization of American Historians and the American Historical Association had not hosted panels of papers on the war at their annual meetings.

Departments of history had not hired new faculty to teach the war. Yet Bob already had been teaching it at college with a master’s degree (1982).

When we met he was assisting his friend Jade Ngoc Quang Huynh in what became 1 of the first trade books in English from a Vietnamese author (1994). Bob already had moved on to doctoral study with George C. Herring, our diplomatic historian of that war, at Kentucky.

Bob was studying Vietnamese language for his dissertation on the independent foreign policy of the Front for the Liberation of Southern Viet Nam (1994). He already had visited the country at least once in John McAuliffe and Lady Borton’s tireless campaign to establish relations between the Socialist Republic of Viet Nam and the USA (1975-1995).

All that was more than 30 years ago, in the decade before we sat quizzing each other in the cafeteria, well before Bob won a university position. Substantial not just another career.

Wait, there’s more. Both Brigham and [his birth father] were products of the American foster care and adoption system

That rings bells.

My grandmère was a child of the state in France. My father’s father whose life savings as a laborer paid for me to study Vietnamese was an orphan child farmworker without compensation.

The first American soldier I published from his war for Viet Nam had been abandoned by his soldier dad after victory in Europe. The second was abandoned during that war by his mom.

In Ha Noi the novelists I know best, Tim’s age, lost their parents in the Communist consolidation of power after defeating France with a united front. Then of course came the war with Saigon and the 1 with the USA when many authors left orphans.

Dana Sachs, a third friend our age who started using Vietnamese language with me and Bob wrote a book of the life given to those orphans of Saigon adopted overseas as the city fell (2011). Bob is onto something 1 hundred per cent probable that is arresting and astonishing.

Brigham not only reveals his own history as an adoptee but opens a startlingly fresh vantage on the fragility of American families, the power of social norms and taboos to shape lives; and the forces that inequitably disrupt families, not least of them war.

Once unheard of. Now unforgettable.

ROBERT K. BRIGHAM is the Shirley Ecker Boskey Professor of History and International Relations at Vassar College.

Looking good in a shot by Monica Church the collage artist who married him, bore their child, and remains his wife. Vassar educated Shirley Eckers Bosley (c. 1936-1940) who then laid foundations for the institutions of internationalism (1954-1983).

He is the author or coauthor of nine previous books, among them Reckless: Henry Kissinger and the Tragedy of Vietnam.

Of all Bob’s books the one the jacket singles out is on Henry Kissinger. I wouldn’t piss on Henry if he was on fire.

Son of a bitch would grab my dick. Now that I am far older than he was when he doubled the length of our war and the butcher’s bill for all sides while selling out our ally in Saigon to the common enemy in Ha Noi and the entire country to China I no long yearn personally to string him from a lamp-post.

He was just a kid, 45 to 50 years old in 1968-1972. Young people make mistakes because they don’t have experience.

My revulsion at Henry is from his seduction by flattery of bright people into his world of vanity without substance. Few besides Lê Đức Thọ have been immune, especially not those United States Americans who blamed Henry for everything.

Elephants fight. No matter who thinks they are in charge they trample the grass.

Augusto Pinochet may well have tortured and killed Robert Horman, a graduate of my high school doing exactly what I do, without the connivance of Henry. So I have paid no attention to him all century.

Oh, look, I just learned here online that the shitbird died nearly 3 years ago (2023). May his memory be a blessing already.

It’s safe to go back in the pool without that pimp hitting on you. If anyone commands the gravitas to write of Henry’s work in our countries without orbiting his self-regard, that’s Bob.

But I would have led with his 2 books about the Viet Nams, Guerrilla Diplomacy: The NLF’s Foreign Relations (1999) and ARVN: life and death in the South Vietnamese Army (2006). Stories of a true war.

I would have been wrong. This is a True War Story looks to be about Vietnam, that United States American adventure Bob wrote his other books about, where our mothers bore us into our journey to the Vietnamese.

Good blurbs! Their authors have read Bob’s book through as I have not yet.

At the top: highly readable. I like this guy.

Undying hope and perseverance in the face of daunting odds. Jack McClean has wholesome values.

A must-read for those who have been fostered, orphaned. I am going to go read this man’s Found: A Veteran Story and write nice things about it that are true.

Phenomenal. In the Vietnamese sense of hiện tượng, said of an author who blows you and all your friends away.

Next up, Frances Fitzgerald, known for her Fire in the Lake: Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam (1972), one of my childhood’s 2 doorstop best-sellers about that war along with The Best and the Brightest (1972) by David Halberstam. Frances is by birth, education, and her own work 1 of those people I had in mind in high school when I concluded that those writing in English about our war were the same goofs who sent us there.

I take it all back. I don’t need to repeat what all my friends who then learned Vietnamese have said about Frances and the Viet Nams.

She has read Bob’s book on Vietnam and summed up her experience with feeling. It’s a moving story, she says, and so extraordinary in its outcome that it’s fitting that ‘true’ is in the title.

1 hundred per cent probable. True story.

Above is the 2 hundred and sixty-second Viet Nam letter since that of February 9, 2022, below.

Viet Nam Literature Project (VNLP) publishes these Viet Nam letters. VNLP is the d/b/a of Books & Authors: Viet Nam, Inc.

We incorporated in 1997 in North Carolina, United States of America. The Secretary of State of North Carolina has listed us as a non-profit in this state since that year.

The Internal Revenue Service of the USA first recognized Books & Authors: Viet Nam, Inc. as a Schedule 501(c)(3) charitable organization in February, 1998. The IRS then confirmed that status twice by letters of March 8, 2005 and March 20, 2009.

Viet Nam letters respects the property of others under paragraph 107 of United States Code Title 17. We explain our policy at length in the letter of September 12, 2022.

The colophon of these Viet Nam letters, directly below, shows the janitor speaking with poet David A. Willson on a Veterans Day.

Matthew Sean Farrell was born at Hartford, Connecticut in 1969 while his father fought in Laos. Matthew grew up in Farmville, Virginia where Alan Ford Farrell taught from 1973 at Hampden Sydney College.

Matt earned his undergraduate degree from the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia in 1988. After service in the United States Marine Corps he separated as lance corporal and settled in 1990 at Charlottesville, Virginia.

He founded Hypocrite Press in 1991 to publish books from authors of Virginia for readers in Charlottesville, the city of the University of Virginia. This month a catalogue of the world’s libraries showed 25 titles issued by the collective from 1996 through 2020.

His father moved on from Farmville in 1996 to Lexington, named for the insurgency in Massachusetts. He served Virginia Military Institute as dean of faculty during the first years of co-education then stayed on teaching French.

Alan retired in 2013 to Glasgow, Virginia. In 2007 Matt put together this book but without his imprint.

The first time I reprinted a work from the collection in 2017 the publisher immediately sent me all the electronic files to the book. He died in 2022.

What is Expended Casings? The publisher’s front cover illustrates the title with 7 young men posing together in the old days of black and white photography.

The back cover gives no publishing category. A retro black and white headshot shows the author in middle age above a summary of his studies, teaching, war record, and distinctions in Virginia.

You get an idea who Alan Farrell is and how he could arrive on a shelf in a Charlottesville bookstore. But what are his Expended Casings?

Poems or not, the subtitle on the author’s title page says. That is a topic of the book.

Is Expended Casings a book of poems or not? Yes.

It is the first book of verse from Alan but neither he or his son selected the verses from magazine publications achieved by an apprenticeship of mailing poems out to editors. That is what we usually mean by a first book of poems.

Author and publisher did not choose verses from a first, second, third, and so on book to publish again in mid-life to show an oeuvre accumulating. We call a book like that selected poems, or new and selected.

Matt rather collected every verse Alan had. Yet the book is not a collected poems, a songs of myself as Walt Whitman called his works in full.

Alan wrote to me the other day that he is not a poet so I removed that title from his byline over the 2 works I have reprinted from Expended Casings. Well who is the prosaic Alan Farrell and what is his work?

The title page hails him as a paratrooper sergeant. That is braggadocio from a miles gloriosus, boasting from someone who has something to brag about, that you may admire or despise, fine with him either way.

A paratrooper jumps out of a perfectly good aircraft to deploy forward with small arms only against the armor and artillery of the companies and battalions and brigades of a division on the other side. Scary.

Alan says that the parachute insignia is called a scare badge because it shows you have been scared. I say that it also means that you are scary: a person who will jump out of an airplane to fight ground forces will carry out orders.

In French the paras are the people who show up and kill everyone at home in counter-insurgency. Family of mine over there did that overseas in a French protectorate then at home in a department of mainland France.

Showed my mom the pictures, frank, sang froid. A paratrooper sergeant commands such people and jumps with them.

Alan retired in 1993 after 25 years in the United States Special Forces where they are all sergeants and they all jump out of airplanes. He was a sergeant major but he doesn’t say that here and neither does his publisher on the back of the book.

Just one of these guys. Paratrooper sergeant in the Great War, he elaborates.

The Great War is what we called the holocaust of all Europe over 1914-1918 in English before World War II made it World War I in American. We still speak of the Great War in French, which Alan taught to Virginia gentry for over 20 years then to the cadets of the state militia for just under 20 more.

When Paul Fussell wrote his Great War and Modern Memory, he conjured the lives and works of poets among such graduates of the universities of Europe, commissioned officers at work in the hecatombs of their generation.

But he dedicated the work to his sergeant Edward Keith Hudson dead next to his lieutenant, Paul, in France in 1945. Here is another sergeant from another Great War, the one the paratroopers fought in Laos while Paul was in the British Museum opening the bloody diaries of dead lieutenants and Matt was being born in Hartford.

Oh which war is that the one I was fuckin’ in that’s which fuckin’ war. That is the Alan Farrell I know in person.

Is he a poet? Are these poems?

Expended Casings are poems or not. The author is a paratrooper sergeant in the Great War.

That is the table of contents. It is not a poem.

Only the last 13 of the 15 total Expended Casings listed are poems or not. Note that the final item, Index of First Lines, is not an index of first lines.

What are the first 2 items, Expended Casings and Deployed Forward?

Expended Casings is an epigraph, a previous work which the author invokes to place the new one in a known world of meaning. You break out of that dark wood.

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,
ché la diritta via era smarrita.

Not just any world of meaning but the divine comedy of the church as laid out by Aquinas and lived by Dante in the politics of cities where humanists speaking Italian gave new birth to the vocabulary of Aristotle. To heck with it:

You break out of that dark wood Dante spoke of and into a clearing.

You don’t wait for Virgil to guide you down through hell and up through purgatory to meet your beloved in heaven. You’ve read him and Dante already.

You sense at once that this is a hallowed place.

The author is, by the way, catechized in the church of Dante. When he says hallowed he doesn’t mean spiritual.

He means something sacral like his christening and communion. Sometimes smoke will hang in the air that you can see, as at a sacrament.

Or the odor of it. He recalls from middle age a younger man considering with reason and all his senses in a state of grace the expended casings.

Note that detectives on the television call them cartridges or shells. Expended casings is a term of a different art, soldiering.

Expended Casings talks you calmly into a frightened man expending his casings. Later, looking back, you too are spent.

But Expended Casings is also not an epigraph to the book Expended Casings. Matt put it in the wrong place for that, after the table of contents rather than before.

Expended Casings occupies the place in the book proper to a preface where an author mentions sources and methods special to the work. Very few soldiers have poked around a forest glade looking at casings often enough to develop opinions about them.

Once a sergeant of the fabled Studies and Observations Group, now retired as a sergeant major of the United States Special Forces, the author is telling himself how he looked at things.

But Expended Casings is not a preface to Expended Casings. The poem Expended casings is cerebral, examining in spare language a modern technology of violence as lived by an individual, with reference to the aesthetics of the church.

You could slip it into an anthology of Futurist poetry by Italian fascist intellectuals, who did write prose poems. The book Expended Casings rather collects the poems or not of a paratrooper sergeant in the Great War.

Expended Casings is an epigraph or not, a preface or not, a poem not like those that follow. They are adolescent, American, profane.

Not sacral. See the expended casing I have reprinted already as Firs’arn Say He’s Gonna.

Sa’majah say one o’ these days he’s gonna break me acrosst of his desk like a shotgun, pump me till my eyes bug out.

Deployed Forward has to be a pun, right? The book deploys this foreword.

A foreword is an introduction by another author. Deployed Forward sure sounds like a different man than the cultivated forward observer who wrote Expended Casings or the jackass who wrote the poems or not.

He begins with his own witness as a student to the lives of the poets Karl Shapiro and Allen Ginsberg. He recalls his own young male students resisting poetry across 30 years of teaching.

He applies the logic of Aquinas and the schoolmen to Wallace Stevens’ verse about poetry almost successfully resisting intelligence. He passes along the apercus of Aristotle and Goethe.

The author of Deployed Forward is a professor of languages and literature. He is a humanist working as an instructor.

From his formation and experience he asks what is a good poem. What makes it not bad?

He goes looking for a good enough not bad Viet Nam war poem among those written and published and read by his contemporaries. Namvet poets here took part in a movement in their generation in higher education of poetry workshops emphasizing confession, therapy, and witness rather than prosody or understanding of soldiering and the nation of Viet Nam.

Negatively, that body of work is not for him. Positively, Alan takes the example set by his peers as license for this other guy, not the polyglot Special Forces instructor with a doctorate and a Phi Beta Kappa key but the paratrooper from the Great War, to publish his poems or not.

They are arguably not bad, meeting standards they exemplify. They use contradiction, parody, repetition, and vernacular speech.

See for instance, directly above, the last item of the book. I noted in my discussion of the table of contents that this Index of first lines is not an index of first lines.

The Index lists 22 items while the collection’s entire contents including Expended Casings and Deployed Forward has only 15 first lines. The 22 all come from poems the author memorized in school, musical in the sense of song, verses because they turn again, versus.

Any of those bats in your belfry? Run those you don’t recognize through a search engine to hear a carillon of meaning that rang when primary and secondary students learned poems then fought a Great War.

Not all of the first lines indexed are the first line of any work. None of them is from the specific old poem referenced by a newer one collected in Expended Casings.

Is the title of Index of first lines its own first line? Index of first lines is another poem or not from a book with an epigraph and a preface or not.

The publisher Matt knew the author Alan pretty well. Now I know Matt too.

The son assembled these expended casings, the poems or not, the epigraph or not, the preface or not, the foreword deployed forward, the antique and the retro photographs that capture the complications and contradictions of the father. What really not bad poetry also does.

Alan has remarked recently to me that he doesn’t know why anyone takes these things seriously. Oh, you just wrote them, I told him.

We read them.

Above is the 2 hundred and sixty-first Viet Nam letter since that of February 9, 2022, below.

Viet Nam Literature Project (VNLP) publishes these Viet Nam letters. VNLP is the d/b/a of Books & Authors: Viet Nam, Inc.

We incorporated in 1997 in North Carolina, United States of America. The Secretary of State of North Carolina has listed us as a non-profit in this state since that year.

The Internal Revenue Service of the USA first recognized Books & Authors: Viet Nam, Inc. as a Schedule 501(c)(3) charitable organization in February, 1998. The IRS then confirmed that status twice by letters of March 8, 2005 and March 20, 2009.

All photographs and text from the book Expended Casings are © Alan Farrell 2007. Viet Nam letters respects the property of others under paragraph 107 of United States Code Title 17. We explain our policy at length in the letter of September 12, 2022.

The colophon of these Viet Nam letters, directly below, shows the janitor speaking with poet David A. Willson on a Veterans Day.

A modest family may commemorate members from 3 generations before the grandparents of the house. A child may grow up sharing dinner with mother & father, brother & sister, visiting aunts & uncles, a resident grandmother, and a guest of honor from among her deceased parents and grandparents and great-grandparents.

This can happen every week taking the child back 1 hundred and 50 years across 3 centuries easy. The ancestor sits right there as a likeness or a dish of food.

A guest not a ghost. A ghost is one of the dead without a living family who remembers them.

A ghost did not survive birth to join a family in the first place or went lost after stepping on a land mine alone on a mission now forgotten for the People’s Army while the family disintegrated in the wars.

An ancestor rather is a dead member of the child’s household. He or she eats rice with an ancestor as he or she does with brothers & sisters, mother & father, aunts & uncles, and their parents & grandparents.

A young adult aged 25 starting his own family this year 2026 might have dined already 25 times this century with a great-great-grandparent dead in 1900. He would have heard again and again from a life under an emperor of the Nguyen, the last dynasty of Viet Nam.

People said then as they still do today: the emperor’s rule stops at the village gate. The Nguyen had at last unified Ha Noi and Saigon over the same years that our 13 colonies joined together.

They then took over the last bits of Champa at the same time as we cleared the last of the European courts and Indian nations from east of the Mississippi. Then the Nguyen dominated neighboring Cambodia and Laos, as we have Canada and Mexico, while rivaling Siam and facing off Beijing.

None of their subjects called for the security forces of the Nguyen emperor to remedy a personal problem. A village policed itself.

Even within the village a family did its best to manage its own affairs rather than be managed by the neighbors. The rule of the French Republic, however, did not stop at the village gate.

About the time of our civil war Paris had overpowered the Nguyen court at Hue to govern all Vietnamese. No one there in Indochina could call any Vietnamese police against the French.

French rule was robbery and murder. Paris counted heads to demand a tax on each living adult in the household by purchase from a monopoly of the rice wine the ancestors require.

When the head of household didn’t pay they killed him. A young father this year in 2026 may have dined already 25 times with a great-grandfather who became an ancestor that way.

The next generation of ancestors, the young father’s grandparents, was that of the revolutionaries. They avoided police as they sought to liberate the common people whom not only French then Japanese then Chinese occupiers but also Vietnamese collaborators oppressed.

The revolutionaries, self-reliant, stealthy, succeeded twice. The young father’s parents lived through the era of 2 different republics of Viet Nam.

From Ha Noi, the Vietnamese Communists mobilized their Democratic Republic of Viet Nam for a long war against the plain Republic, in Saigon, through a Fatherland Front of popular organizations. For instance, 2 of the biggest were the 1 for women and the 1 for workers.

Everyone was under observation all the time by every relevant organization. That republic was 1 big village with no gate against the VC.

The most powerful organization in the front was the People’s Police, watching all the others. Still today there is always a member listening and watching, and an office on every block.

No one goes out of their way to draw further attention from the People’s Police. The republic at Saigon lasted from 1954 through 1975 first through more clandestine then more chaotic control.

A brother of the founder of the Republic governed as the VC did in Ha Noi by a secret party organization throughout the police and every other office of the state. After rivals killed both brothers in 1963 police organizations multiplied.

Everyone who could stay away from them, did. Then, when Ha Noi won, their new, unified, Socialist Republic of Viet Nam invited officers of the defeated republic, our young man’s father’s generation, to come in for a few days of re-education.

Many never were seen again. Most spent 1 year, 5 years, 15 years in prisons where they had to build their own shelter and grow their own food without tools.

No our typical young father does not call the police. He takes counsel from the lives of the honored dead.

Above is the 2 hundred and sixtieth Viet Nam letter since February 9, 2022, below.

Viet Nam Literature Project (VNLP) publishes these Viet Nam letters. VNLP is the d/b/a of Books & Authors: Viet Nam, Inc.

We incorporated in 1997 in North Carolina, United States of America. The Secretary of State of North Carolina has listed us as a non-profit in this state since that year.

The Internal Revenue Service of the USA first recognized Books & Authors: Viet Nam, Inc. as a Schedule 501(c)(3) charitable organization in February, 1998. The IRS then confirmed that status twice by letters of March 8, 2005 and March 20, 2009.

This is the first Viet Nam letter drawing on opinions we have developed in defense of asylum seekers and criminal defendants in federal and state courts of the United States of America.

VNLP has produced those opinions using works published in Southeast Asian studies and Vietnamese studies by members of the Association for Asian Studies fostered by grants from the National Resource Center of the United States Department of Education under Title VI of the National Defense Education Act of 1958 then the Higher Education Act of 1965. This letter is not an opinion.

The colophon of these Viet Nam letters, directly above, shows the janitor speaking with poet David A. Willson on a Veterans Day.

Major call a Battalion formation. Tol’ us he’s gonna hump our ass off in the field this munf’

Canto the Second

Cap’n say if I fuck up again, my ass is grass.

Canto the Third

Lootinant tol’ me to get my ass — my young ass, actually —outta his office right fuckin’ now.

Canto the Fourth

Sa’majah say one o’ these days he’s gonna break me acrosst of his desk like a shotgun, pump me till my eyes bug out.

Canto the Fifth

Firs’arn say he’s gonna butt fuck me with the bore brush to the .50 . . . twice!

Canto the Sixth

Platoon Sarge looking’ for me. Say he’s gonna chew my ass.

Canto the Seventh

Range NCO tol’ me okay so I wanna be a candy ass. I can go get my earplugs I lef’ in the deuce-an’-a-half.

Canto the Eighth

Squad Leader this morning offer to kick my ass 'rount the block on account of my foo’locker open durin’ duty hours.

Canto the Ninth

Girlfriend call all the way from Dee-moines to tell me I’m a selfish asshole . . . again!

Canto the Tenth

Got a question: What is it about my ass?

Alan Farrell fought alongside Hmong strikers on the Ho Chi Minh trail 1968-70 as a sergeant in the Studies and Observations Group, United States Army Special Forces.

Soon after his return Alan joined the reserves. He retired as sergeant major (18Z5F) in 1993.

A previous poem, Expended Casings, decorated with Alan’s photographs of those he fought with, has attracted more readers more quickly than any other Viet Nam letter.

Both poems appear in his collection Expended Casings (2007.) Firs’arn Say He’s Gonna appears here by permission of the author © Alan Farrell 1968-2007 all rights reserved.

Viet Nam letters respects the property of others under paragraph 107 of United States Code Title 17. We explain our policy at length in the letter of September 12, 2022.

This is the 2 hundred and fifty-ninth Viet Nam letter since February 9, 2022. Every Viet Nam letter draws attention to literature in the sense of things to read occasioned by the nation of Viet Nam. Read all about it.

Viet Nam Literature Project (VNLP) publishes these Viet Nam letters. VNLP is the d/b/a of Books & Authors: Viet Nam, Inc.

We incorporated in 1997 in North Carolina, United States of America. The Secretary of State of North Carolina has listed us as a non-profit in this state since that year.

The Internal Revenue Service of the USA first recognized Books & Authors: Viet Nam, Inc. as a Schedule 501(c)(3) charitable organization in February, 1998. The IRS then confirmed that status twice by letters of March 8, 2005 and March 20, 2009.

The colophon of these Viet Nam letters, directly above, shows the janitor speaking with poet David A. Willson on a Veterans Day.

A senior man represented his household and those of his brothers and cousins in the senate. The assembled politicians represented the city and its citizens to others on the mainland and islands of the Mediterranean basin.

If the polis had a constitution Aristotle and his men at the first academy read it. When there wasn’t a constitution already they wrote one.

That was centuries before Christmas and the common era. Christians started reading Aristotle’s politics only when our new cities broke out to dominate the old continent and the new ones.

After 5 hundred years of that, when I was a young man, an academic of island and mainland southeast Asia, Benedict Anderson, wrote how the new nations represented themselves among their people in books and newspapers.

That is the political representation in contemporary Viet Nam I know something about. I walked around downtown Ha Noi late last century with a woman whom the prime minister had asked to represent the failings of the new unified nation.

Then his party detained her. Another friend there had spent the war with southern Viet Nam as far north as can be, among those minorities of the hills who had fought against the French, teaching them national and world history.

The prime minister had asked him with all the other authors to tell it like it is. When he did soldiers showed up and took his manuscripts so he went into the restaurant business.

I was the guest in Ha Noi of a man who had represented Viet Nam in English and French publishing its history and literature in those languages. He got re-educated briefly when partisans of China became suspicious of anyone who could read or write.

I crossed paths with a novelist just my age well launched on a career that has continued to this day representing his country as a diplomat as well as an author. When I first arrived there I already was the publisher at my university of a poet just recently released from an accumulated 30 years in prison for shooting his mouth off every time they let him out.

I have many stories like this representing my friends who have represented Viet Nam. I am a partisan of anyone who does that against any who interfere.

Paul Schumer is 1 of Aristotle’s men and women. Where there is a constitution, he reads it.

Where there is no constitution he writes it. You may know that the constitution of the United Kingdom for instance is not written.

You just have to know what it would mean did it exist. British politicians enjoy a remarkable consensus on a document no one has read.

The constitution of the United States of America is not only written but intensely and widely read. Lately the 1 of 2 parties which dominates all 3 branches of federal government considers that our constitution means whatever their leader of party and government says it does at 3 o’clock in the morning.

I find this relaxing. Surely never again will anyone take seriously a political scientist from the USA condescending to evaluate the self-rule of the Vietnamese nation.

Paul instead lays out how they manage their affairs. There is a constitution and an overt government that a covert party attempts to control.

Hijinks ensue. I picked this stuff up chatting with friends.

You can just read Paul’s chapter in Jonathan’s book representing their friends who represent Viet Nam from abroad in English then go make friends of your own. Thank god for Aristotle and the academy.

Aristotle’s work that has most touched me is on tragedy. A tragedy isn’t a death or a defeat or disappointment, the fall of a city and the destruction of its people, a plague or a plane crash.

It is a representation of a politician who loses his polis to some such disaster through moral blindness. A tragedy is a work of art that arouses pity at this deficit and terror of its consequences among the assembled people.

I think United States Americans are now standing before the assembled world among the bodies strewn in the last act of the tragedy of our constitution. Paul’s chapter leaves me thinking that over at the representation of Viet Nam those on stage and in the audience rather are working toward a robust liberal democracy.

That opinion is a crime in the Socialist Republic of Viet Nam, by the way, called peaceful evolution. Well, over there pacifism is illegal too but you don’t see them starting any wars.

Listen to what they say and watch what they do. Read Paul.

This is the 2 hundred and fifty-eighth Viet Nam letter since February 9, 2022. It is the fifth letter addressed to the Routledge Handbook for Contemporary Vietnam edited by Jonathan London. We published the first on January 5, 2023:

Knowing anything about that country and its people is a royal pain in the ass. Everyone thinks they own the place.

The second on January 14, 2023:

The bursary student there went on to be professionally murdered, as did the Washington lawyer who once came to town to help our sister city initiative with Hue.

The third on February 10, 2023:

“How To Study Contemporary Vietnam”

And the fourth on April 14, 2023:

But we mean the same thing, as those in the Pentagon who wrote in their papers about North Viet Nam did not.

Every Viet Nam letter draws attention to literature in the sense of things to read occasioned by the nation of Viet Nam. Read all about it.

Viet Nam letters respects the property of others under paragraph 107 of United States Code Title 17. If we asked for permission it wouldn’t be criticism. We explain our fair use at length in the letter of September 12, 2022.

Viet Nam Literature Project (VNLP) publishes these Viet Nam letters. VNLP is the d/b/a of Books & Authors: Viet Nam, Inc.

We incorporated in 1997 in North Carolina, United States of America. The Secretary of State of North Carolina has listed us as a non-profit in this state since that year.

The Internal Revenue Service of the USA first recognized Books & Authors: Viet Nam, Inc. as a Schedule 501(c)(3) charitable organization in February, 1998. The IRS then confirmed that status twice by letters of March 8, 2005 and March 20, 2009.

The colophon of these Viet Nam letters, directly above, shows the janitor speaking with poet David A. Willson on a Veterans Day.

The interweb just now found more monosyllabic rhymes with Immanuel’s patriline in our English word hoard: crunt, dunt, funt, gunt, junt, lunt, munt, nunt, slunt, sprunt, strunt, sunt, unt, and vunt.

I have never heard or read those in English oh maybe sprunt and won’t look any of them up until I have. I don’t play Scrabble or anybody else’s word game.

I am a linguist, a naturalist of our species. 30 years ago my good buddy in Ha Noi was a political scientist who taught a Tom Waits song to Vietnamese there so they might learn both high and low English, which is a German language.

He was rabid on how to pronounce Kant in his mother tongue which is also that of Immanuel. We pronounce the name differently in English to distance the university from life, so we may reason without giving offense or hearing Beavis and Butthead snigger in the back row.

We say his name to invoke the body of universal reason, the dogma of philosophy, the university itself. That chair or dean who won’t let you learn, research, teach, or write as you think best because then everyone else would have to, that’s a Kant in the grip of his categorical imperative, what another one later called the iron cage of reason.

It’s a problem. Not the kind where the answer is in the teacher’s manual, but like a 3-color problem, where you have to work them out for your own situation, and possibly like the problem of the 7 bridges of Königsberg, where Kant walked, now proven to have no solution at all.

By Kant and the Problem the author and publisher invoke on the title page both the determinist authority and the indeterminate life of university thought. What Problem of History?

The problem I see in the dedication shown in the photograph above and copied below in bold is that of my childhood history, 1964-1975. Those in charge of the United States of America interfered in the government of the new nations of Southeast Asia while quarreling among themselves as their daughters, maids, nurses, secretaries, and wives liberated themselves after the black Americans had.

To Arthur and Dale Galston, who will see their influence on these pages.

Arthur William Galston rose through university work at Cornell where he met Dale Judith Kuntz to invent by accident dioxin the active ingredient of the military defoliant Agent Orange that still kills so many and then at Yale to ban the poison from use in war and to found bioethics both categorical imperatives.

Dale Galston practiced history, what do you know, at Cornell then Illinois before taking her terminal degree in psychology at Yale then comforting children from troubled families in the towns like hers and mine surrounding my native New Haven.

But after turning the page I see that the problem of history the author addresses with Kant is not the 1 which William invoked with the married names of his mother and father. Look between Introduction and Conclusion at that table of contents:

1. The Present Status of the Idea of History;

Status here is standing in the sense of rising to speak in assembly or at court. It is also status in the sense of rank, where you stand.

In the present of 1975 when Chicago published this book the 2 great powers of the United Nations each denied to its own apparat standing to discuss any other idea of history. If you wanted to rise you spoke, over there, of history’s material dialectic.

Over here, the idea of history was progress. Even those who spoke against progress styled themselves avant-garde, that is, progressive.

The present status of the idea of history is assumed at all times, unspoken. Historians escape to the library and read letters from the past while this present and that revolve outside.

2. Sacred and Secular: The Conjectural Beginning of Human History;

Funny thing, both sacred and secular look like scissors and scythe. Before Christ the sacred precincts of the temple were cut off, say by a Druid with a sickle, from the secular world which since Christendom fell is cut off from god.

Then came anthropology. There at the beginning, Kant conjectured this new profession.

His human history was, to use an antique word, primitive. Over 2 hundred and 50 years across 4 centuries we have since learned many things for sure about the emergence of our genera and how our species has built our world.

I have studied and taught human origins at the University of North Carolina. I view Kant’s conjectures as a set of the rationalizations for inequality that my profession in the USA has opposed since Max Weber advised our founder Franz Boas to flee here from Heidelberg’s iron cage.

3. Morality and Happiness: The Dualism of Freedom and Nature in the Thought of Rousseau;

What anyone who wants to already knows about Jean-Jacques Rousseau. That chapter is foil to William’s interest in Kant essays few have read:

4. Kant’s Philosophy of History: The Convergence of Morality and Natural Science;

and

5. Kant’s Philosophy of History: System and Critique.

The jewels of the book, what the author cared about. Why would I expect instead William’s witness to our common past?

Because my political scientists are my friend James C. Scott, witness to peasant resistance to the new Malaysian nation, and his colleague, contemporary, and peer in status Benedict Anderson, witness to the entirely novel Indonesia’s year of living dangerously, also Ben’s student Thaveeporn Vasavakul and my Ha Noi buddy the mad German who ran with me through the last years of đổi mới in the Socialist Republic of that Viet Nam coeval with the Comanche, the Lakota, and the USA. We all have met Kant and Rousseau in the seminar and study but we speak with the other witnesses.

Still, why expect an United States Americanist who reads German to address our interests? Because the author prefaces this first book with the paragraph photographed below and quoted in bold below that.

This study was evoked by the contemporary crisis of liberal democracy.

Indeed. I was there with the author’s mom and dad over 1969 and 1970 in greater New Haven with the Black Panther Party, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the National Guard, the New Haven Police Department, the White House plumbers, and Yale.

William was in the service those years, a federal man, then began graduate work at Rockefeller’s university at Chicago in the reign of the democrat Richard Daley. Now here we are again in the contemporary crisis of liberal democracy as I read his book and write this letter at the end of 2025.

As an immediate practical matter it was important for me to strive for a fair judgement of the contending political forces.

Was the immediate practical matter the beginning of the Selective Service lottery in December, 1969? That year William volunteered, the only way to join the United States Marine Corps, separating in 1970.

He served as an enlisted Marine, the real thing. As a college graduate he yet dodged a commission.

A stand-up man, a person of moral stature. But what contending political forces had he judged?

The executive versus legislators? The people v. city hall? Unions v. workers?

The United States Army v. our soldiers? Democracy at home v. autocracy in foreign affairs? Internationalists from area studies v. those from banks?

CIA v. FBI? The Security and Exchange Commission v. Wall Street? Farm policy v. farmers v. farmworkers?

The mandarin on his way up did not say. Confucian, a superior man, he estimated the contending political forces and stood mute.

More generally, it seemed important to inquire whether what we are now enduring is merely a transitory lapse of confidence or rather the death-throes of an entire mode of political organization and way of life

Here we are again 50 years later. It has not been a transitory lapse of confidence.

Rather the death-throes of an entire mode of political organization and way of life. While the GOP is drowning the USA in the bathtub as promised, the university at Chicago has paused graduate admissions in political economy and social thought.

and, if the latter, whether the demise is stemming from uncontrollable external cause or from “internal contradictions.”

Those “'internal contradictions” are a quotation not attributed to Karl Marx. Any reader recognizes that shibboleth while no democrat of left or right can use that language to tar the author as a commie because politicians and voters don’t read more than 1 social theory.

Still, who quotes Marx and doesn’t say so? This young Marine was complicated.

The second half of his preface flashes a gang sign then grips the reader in the handshake of the secret society which has worked since he entered college to destroy the government at Washington, D.C. which had beaten Berlin twice, the second time while also defeating Rome and Tokyo, then Moscow while inviting all comers to higher education. William thanks Allan Bloom for recruiting him to university life.

Allan was a student of Leo Strauss and the teacher of many Straussians. They are reactionary revanchist revolutionaries for the restoration of the days when organizing a union was a crime, who make propaganda for a Platonic republic of aristocrats under a king.

Look them up, they will tell you all about it. William next thanks Joseph Crapsey the chair of his thesis committee.

Joseph directed a center at Chicago for the study of democracy named for 1 of its opponents, John M. Olin, an opinionated moneybags off the Monopoly board, an industrialist like Diet Smith in Dick Tracy turned financier like Daddy Warbucks in Little Orphan Annie. Olin was a funder of the anti-democratic movement whose victory over the USA we see today.

So what? Everyone is on some side easily caricatured.

The anomaly is that our William has made his career in and out of the Brookings Institution, what we mean when we speak of the establishment, what we mean when we say liberal. His old commander-in-chief, Richard Nixon, fire-bombed their building during the crisis of liberal democracy that provoked this book.

Then Augusto Pinochet the philosopher king of the department of economics at Chicago blew up an automobile not far away, attacking another liberal think tank. Rather than rally with his teachers to the hot war against democracy, William instead soldiered through his years of adult vigor for the decent John Anderson, the doomed Walter Mondale, then won his way at last into the White House with Bill Clinton and fell with the polite Al Gore.

Not just a democrat but a Democrat. Apparat, cadre for people’s rule.

How had William got from Allan Bloom to my side in this quarrel? I wrote to the student of liberal democracy I read social theory with at Chapel Hill to ask if he had heard of William.

John McGowan replied right away to say I am a big fan of his book The Practice of Liberal Pluralism (2005). John had not heard of the Strauss connection.

What in the world is that all about? What kind of Kant is William A. Galston?

Where does he stand in the contemporary crisis of liberal democracy? What does his idea of history have to do with Viet Nam?

This is the 2 hundred and fifty-sixth Viet Nam letter since February 9, 2022.

It is the second of 2 letters addressed so far to Kant and the Problem of History. We published the first 2 years ago, on November 14, 2023,

the week after the first letter on William A. Galston’s father, Arthur W. Galston, on November 9, 2023.

Every Viet Nam letter draws attention to literature in the sense of things to read occasioned by the nation of Viet Nam. Read all about it.

Viet Nam letters respects the property of others under paragraph 107 of United States Code Title 17. If we asked for permission it wouldn’t be criticism. We explain our fair use at length in the letter of September 12, 2022.

Viet Nam Literature Project (VNLP) publishes these Viet Nam letters. VNLP is the d/b/a of Books & Authors: Viet Nam, Inc.

We incorporated in 1997 in North Carolina, United States of America. The Secretary of State of North Carolina has listed us as a non-profit in this state since that year.

The Internal Revenue Service of the USA first recognized Books & Authors: Viet Nam, Inc. as a Schedule 501(c)(3) charitable organization in February, 1998. The IRS then confirmed that status twice by letters of March 8, 2005 and March 20, 2009.

The colophon of these Viet Nam letters, directly above, shows the janitor speaking with poet David A. Willson on a Veterans Day.

“Through poems and images, a local reveals the true history of the Mekong Delta.”

The book designer and illustrator join the publisher to say the very same thing on the back cover, louder, more prominently.

THROUGH POEMS AND IMAGES, A LOCAL REVEALS THE TRUE HISTORY OF THE MEKONG DELTA

True history? The author prefaces her work to say that those hurt by bloodshed avoid talking about it; those benefiting from conflicts brag without hesitation. We lie to each other to live on without being tortured by our conscience.

True history of the Mekong Delta? The title poem Drowning Dragon reads, I snake through jungles in the black morning the cunning crocodile cackles between teeth faceless bodies dropped from the land above dropping into his mouth - a feast of lies he spends the dawn ripping flesh apart saving for years of gods’ upheaval.

I searched from the front to the back of the book for the rest of the title, Slips by Burning Plains. I did not find those very words.

Then I closed the book and saw faceless bodies dropped on cracked mud in the fields below a dead tree. I grew up singing for amber waves of grain, for purple mountain majesties above the fruited plain in the church who first published that hymn when the grandfather who christened me was still a small child.

Neither the painter or the poet did but we 3 are on the same page. This is a book about a feast of lies, the world gone wrong, for years of gods’ upheaval.

Who is the author? The journalist Khải Đơn publishes under her own imprint at Substack.

See her English-language essays, e.g.

Nowadays, the temple gate stands on the Thai side, while the body of the temple sits on top of the Dangrek Mountains on the Cambodian side. Thai border patrol and the Cambodian border army have been firing and killing each other for decades over the temple of their common gods.

[The border swallows our existence. July 16, 2023]

a selection of articles in Vietnamese. The translation machine does a good enough job with her observations:

Có một sự thật khác, là ở Việt Nam, bạn sẽ khó được nghe nhắc đến tên Hòa Hảo, Cao Đài, hay Bình Xuyên. Chắc chắn những người làm phim biết họ không được đụng đến những cái tên này, dù đó là lịch sử, dù đó là những tôn giáo nội sinh và nhóm vũ trang đã đứng lên chống Pháp từ trước khi Việt Minh trở thành cái gì đó cần phải ca ngợi mãi mãi. Đó là những cái tên 100% sẽ bị kiểm duyệt xóa sổ và vì vậy, tất nhiên, chúng không bao giờ lên phim.

[Khi phê bình nghệ thuật nhuốm máu không ghê tay. Sạch sẽ, sạch sẽ, vô cùng sạch sẽ. October 16, 2022]

she introduces her Vietnamese-language readings about war:

Vì những gặp gỡ và quan sát này, tôi nhận thức rằng hiểu nhiều mặt về cuộc chiến có ảnh hưởng tới sự hình thành bản thân và cộng đồng là điều tôi phải làm. Tôi không muốn trở thành nạn nhân kế tiếp của chủ nghĩa dân tộc cực đoan, không muốn tin vào những diễn ngôn thù địch được cài cắm trong các hình thức kể chuyện, và càng không muốn mình sẽ tiếp tay cho tương lai thù địch mới mẻ.

[Đọc về chiến tranh: Trong chuyến đi hiểu thế giới của mình. June 15, 2025]

and short stories, for instance this 1 from last month this year:

Tú về lại thành phố sau khi tiếng súng tan. Tai phải đã bị điếc. Một bàn tay không ngọ nguậy được sau khi viên đạn xuyên qua cùi chỏ.

Gương mặt Tú khi nhìn thẳng giờ như mặt trăng gãy nửa, vì quả pháo bay thẳng vào sân khấu tiền phương đã vạt mất một bên xương sọ và để lại vết cong hệt như mảnh trăng đang mỉm cười. Vì vậy Tú phải nhìn người xung quanh từ bên trái chứ không nhìn thẳng, tránh đi sự bối rối cho người đối diện nếu ánh mắt họ lỡ rơi vào nửa lõm của vầng trăng kia.

[Tượng đài - Truyện ngắn. (September 4, 2025]

poems in English or in Vietnamese, e.g.

Sweetened steam soaks our home roof
Briny sauce, blistering pepper,
Throbbing heart, panting gills
The fish mouth gaped in your beloving salt.

[Braised fish. June 29, 2023]

and

Người hỏi tôi Có nghe tiếng đập của sự cô đơn nhà bên Sầm sập tiếng giãy của sinh vật dần kiệt sức xuyên qua

[Ở trọ - một bài thơ: Trong thời gian im lặng. August 18, 2025]

and

Khải Đơn’s personal statement,

“I am intrigued by the conflict between the human body and artificial borders that confine us in our narrow assumptions in life. I am full of them: prejudice, ignorance, anger.”

This is the 2 hundred and fifty-fifth Viet Nam letter since February 9, 2022. This is the second of 2 letters addressed so far to Drowning Dragon Slips by Burning Plains. The first appeared on November 25, 2025.

Every Viet Nam letter draws attention to literature in the sense of things to read occasioned by the nation of Viet Nam. Read all about it.

Viet Nam letters respects the property of others under paragraph 107 of United States Code Title 17. If we asked for permission it wouldn’t be criticism. We explain our fair use at length in the letter of September 12, 2022.

Viet Nam Literature Project (VNLP) publishes these Viet Nam letters. VNLP is the d/b/a of Books & Authors: Viet Nam, Inc.

We incorporated in 1997 in North Carolina, United States of America. The Secretary of State of North Carolina has listed us as a non-profit in this state since that year.

The Internal Revenue Service of the USA first recognized Books & Authors: Viet Nam, Inc. as a Schedule 501(c)(3) charitable organization in February, 1998. The IRS then confirmed that status twice by letters of March 8, 2005 and March 20, 2009.

The colophon of these Viet Nam letters, directly above, shows the janitor speaking with poet David A. Willson on a Veterans Day.

Hannah Gaskamp decorated the jacket with a painting by Hung Viet Nguyen, once a commercial illustrator, now a fine artist.

Texas Tech University Press published Drowning Dragon Slips By Burning Plains under the imprint of the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network.

Tam Vu permitted the use of the author photo. I have not yet learned more about Tam.

Hung is my girlfriend’s age, born 1957, both 3 years older than me. Still I can call her little sister while the artist is irrevocably my big brother in his mother tongue.

Born in Saigon, he studied biology there and it shows both on the cover and in his works that Hannah laid among Khải Đơn’s poems within. Creatures and plants in drought and flood.

That he studied after high school suggests that his parents did not take part in the government of the Republic of Viet Nam founded at Saigon in 1954. That he studied biology rather than the fine art he had set his heart on since elementary school suggests that his people were not revolutionaries of the Front for the Liberation of Southern Viet Nam and then apparat of the Socialist Republic of Viet Nam unified from Ha Noi in 1976.

Just folks. He left the SRVN as an illegal emigrant to welcome here in the United States of America over the years I studied in college.

At her page on the interweb Hannah looks startlingly like a sister of my mother’s father, raised in a third generation of Dutch-speaking farmers in Michigan. They are Devries, of Friesland, fields borrowed from the sea.

Gaskamps, from a field, what camp and campus mean, a kamps where gaggle the gas in the marshy bits, settled Texas as did so many German-speaking families fleeing armed service and wars. How the USA gained not only engineers and lawyers but also pacifists in high places, and anti-fascist armed servants such as Dwight David Eisenhower.

Hannah has risen through Communication Design at Texas State University to lead book design at Texas Tech University Press. She has contributed the cover of at least 3 other Texas Tech books by authors with a Vietnamese name, and designed covers not adopted of at least 2 more, 1 of them 3 times.

I didn’t count her covers published and designs discarded for Texas Tech books having to do with war without Vietnamese names. Altogether her body of work stands at her university with those of its historian of Viet Nam, Patricia Pelley, and Steven Maxner the archivist of the people of the war.

I have not yet learned who designed that logo on the back cover for the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network. I can read it to you.

Atop, that bird is 1 of the many who circle the brass drums of Đông Sơn, evidence of 3 thousand years of continuing rice culture in the Red River delta and trade into the archipelagos. Below, the water buffalo, creature of earth and water, recalls the Mekong delta, settled by the Nguyen over the same years as the Comanche took New Mexico and Texas, the Lakota took the Black Hills, and the United States Americans built Washington, DC.

The colored decorations recall the trade goods woven by the dry-rice highland peoples every lowland Viet wet-rice state has engaged with, and the houses on stilts of the minority from whose speech the national language has most recently diverged. I am telling you what everyone knows.

I take that swelling heart as DVAN’s own, though as many as 1 in 10 Vietnamese overall and more outside the country know the sacred heart of Jesus. Could also be the butt of that water buffalo but for sure these people got heart.

Diasporic in my native century conjured the Greeks who dispersed from their city states throughout the Persian then Roman empires, speaking the common tongue of the gospels and epistles, and to the Jews speaking other languages who scattered after Rome destroyed our temple at Jerusalem. Around the universities of the USA in this century it is 1 of those words we use to bridge differences, everyone agreeing aloud in unison with different things in mind, what in the church, especially the diasporic African church, we call reconciliation.

Vietnamese as a national script began in the Roman church when Vietnamese-speaking communicants journeying to the sub-continent not yet known as India as well as Rome and Spain then France wrote to each other and the folks back home in the Roman alphabet. The Diasporic Vietnamese are like that, dispersed yet in communication.

Artists. This book itself, for example, is a work of at least 4 arts.

Network. Like the nerves of the heart and the vessels of its blood.

Hannah put no back-scratching fulsome blurbs from other authors on the front or back or flaps. She used anonymous text from a person who had read the poems and written down what they think.

Bless them. Read their work for summary and themes of Khải Đơn‘s poems.

I don’t know whether the author or publisher wrote the title, Drowning Dragon Slips By Burning Plains. “Drowning Dragon” tout court is the name of a poem inside.

I have not yet spotted “slips by burning plains” in the table of contents or text. Hung’s cover illustration also appears inside, facing the poem “Foreign Husbands.”

To read of a drowning dragon shocks me. A dragon is lord of air and water.

Like a dragon, the poet surfs. No kidding, Khải Đơn surfs.

Like a dragon, in high school and college I tended goal in varsity water polo, leaping from deep water into the air.

Later when I was a young editor my friend Huynh Sanh Thong, born in Gia Dinh, Cochinchine, then in retirement at Hamden, Connecticut just east of my hometown Woodbridge expounded to me his insight that mothers speaking of snakes to their infants originated all of human “thought, language, and culture.” He saw the dragon’s 4 limbs as a Confucian, masculine, revision of the Taoist, hermaphrodite, snake.

Thong read against dragons as a scholar-gentry in retreat from the real world into life, then at his climacteric as I am now. Thong did not drown dragons.

In Ha Noi, 1 of the daughters of Đặng Thai Mai the Minister of Education of the Democratic Republic of Viet Nam who married generals, 1 each, among them Võ Nguyên Giáp who defeated the French Republic and the United States of America, once addressed me as a carp. She had a keen eye.

Many women have remarked soon after meeting me that I am hiền, nhưng hay cáu, vì vật vờ. Gentle but I lose my shit because I am scatter-brained.

Personality assessment is a super-power all the grown women raise all the girls to acquire, from infancy. See Helle Rydstrom’s book about becoming a woman, as Simone de Beauvoir had put it, among the people of the Red River delta.

Without assertiveness or executive skills I was yet in the position of being a somebody in Ha Noi over those years. But the general’s wife took one look at me, we had not even sat down, and said you are a bottom feeder, suitable only for gefilte fish.

She was also extending a blessing. She explained that a carp journeys at new year to heaven where he becomes a dragon.

That is, a man sits the exams and wins a doctorate, acquiring the powers of institutional reason. She has turned out to be right about that too when I had no such intention at that time.

A dragon is nature and nurture, the life world of fundamental forces and the real, in the sense of royal, world of government, law, medicine, research, and teaching, at play together. Like them or not, you don’t want us drowning.

We shall all swim with dragons or burn. The first words of the title on the cover of this book provoke me to say that I want the author to be mistaken.

This is the 2 hundred and fifty-fourth Viet Nam letter since February 9, 2022. We have addressed a second letter to Drowning Dragon Slips By Burning Plains on December 16, 2025.

Every Viet Nam letter draws attention to literature in the sense of things to read occasioned by the nation of Viet Nam. Read all about it.

Viet Nam letters respects the property of others under paragraph 107 of United States Code Title 17. If we asked for permission it wouldn’t be criticism. We explain our fair use at length in the letter of September 12, 2022.

Viet Nam Literature Project (VNLP) publishes these Viet Nam letters. VNLP is the d/b/a of Books & Authors: Viet Nam, Inc.

We incorporated in 1997 in North Carolina, United States of America. The Secretary of State of North Carolina has listed us as a non-profit in this state since that year.

The Internal Revenue Service of the USA recognized us as a Schedule 501(c)(3) charitable organization in February, 1998. The IRS has confirmed that status by letters of March 8, 2005 and March 20, 2009.

The colophon of these Viet Nam letters, directly above, shows the janitor speaking with poet David A. Willson on a Veterans Day.

City Psalm

City

As in the city of god. The poet Denise Levertov arrived at death in the Catholic Church of the African bishop Augustine of Hippo who wasn’t christened as an infant either.

Psalm

Such as David sang before Solomon. Denise was a Jew, born Oriental as elder Britons still called us in 1923, raised in our law.

The killings continue,

the poet sings not of assassination, collateral damage, euthanasia, execution, fratricide, genocide, homicide, honor killing, infanticide, just war, lynching, manslaughter, mass murder, murder in the first, with premeditation, second, with intent, or third, reckless degree, parricide, regicide, rules of engagement, self-defense, suicide, war, war of agression, war of conquest, or wrongful death,

but killings. The rest are legal terms parsing what jeopardy you are in or sheltered from. Our law reads: you shall not kill.

each second pain and misfortune extend themselves in the genetic chain, injustice is done knowingly,

An epigenetically and sociobiologically uncontroversial assertion. Rich people make poor people take the hard knocks which change their expression of the genome.

Scholars and scientists have embraced this averaging of risk by riding free on the life of others as a law of economics, class, a law of nature, race, or a law of politics, nation, altogether social Darwinism. These are error and sin.

and the air bears the dust of decayed hopes, yet breathing those fumes, walking the thronged pavement

As another city psalm, “Harlem,” by Langston Hughes (1951), spoken of as “A Dream Deferred,” asks, regarding a raisin in the sun, “Does it stink like rotten meat?”

among crippled lives,

Oppression.

jackhammers raging,

Creative destruction.

a parking lot painfully agleam in the May sun,

Chrome consumerism.

I have seen not behind but within, within the dull grief, blown grit, hideous concrete facades, another grief, a gleam as of dew, an abode of mercy, have heard not behind but within noise a humming that drifted into a quiet smile.

Nothing was changed, all was revealed otherwise; not that horror was not, not that the killings did not continue, not that I thought there was to be no more despair, but that as if transparent all disclosed an otherness that was blessed, that was bliss.

The previous letter on Denise’s poem presents “this religious experience of my life, vastation.

“Hasidim (viz. Potok, 1967) such as the poet’s father call it the breaking of the vessels (viz. Bloom, 1982.) The sense of god in his, whatever, absence and of his, whatever, creation in our, whoever’s, shambles.”

I saw Paradise in the dust of the street.

“They paved Paradise” sang Joni Mitchell 6 years later in another city psalm of a parking lot, Big Yellow Taxi (1970).

Oyez 7

We say oyez 3 times to bring court into session. Oyez, the press, published 10 poems broadside over 1964-5 as I came out of latency into the escalation of our war for Viet Nam.

Oyez 7, City Psalm, by Denise Levertov appeared in 300 copies. Nearly 20 years later I bought mine among the broadsides and comic books that taught me how to write these letters.

Copyright 1964 Denise Levertov

Viet Nam letters respects the property of others under paragraph 107 of United States Code Title 17. If we asked for permission it wouldn’t be criticism. We explain our fair use at length in the letter of September 12, 2022.

This is the 2 hundred and fifty-third Viet Nam letter since February 9, 2022. This is the second of 2 letters addressed so far to City Psalm. The first appeared on October 29, 2024.

Every Viet Nam letter draws attention to literature in the sense of things to read occasioned by the nation of Viet Nam. Read all about it.

Viet Nam Literature Project (VNLP) publishes these Viet Nam letters. VNLP is the d/b/a of Books & Authors: Viet Nam, Inc.

We incorporated in 1997 in North Carolina, United States of America. The Secretary of State of North Carolina has listed us as a non-profit in this state since that year.

The Internal Revenue Service of the USA recognized us as a Schedule 501(c)(3) charitable organization in February, 1998. The IRS has confirmed that status by letters of March 8, 2005 and March 20, 2009.

The colophon of these Viet Nam letters, directly above, shows the janitor speaking with poet David A. Willson on a Veterans Day.

153 of you now subscribe to these Viet Nam letters. 150 is anthropologist Robin Dunbar’s number for how many people each exemplar of homo sapiens can relate to, given the size of our brain.

My Dunbar number at these letters has been stable. I have not yet found data from Substack specifying how stable, for how long.

My recollection is that we reached 150 sometime in the second calendar year of publication, 2023, certainly in 2024. Since then subscribers have come and gone 1 at a time each month while our total varies closely around Robin’s median.

The number of readers overall, not subscribers alone, of each letter reached a long-standing high point of 262, in our first month of publication. That was for my second letter on Dawson’s War by B.K. Marshall.

262 is close to the top in the high range of Robin’s number, at a time when about 70 of you had subscribed, at the low range. I conjecture that most of those readers came from the network around the brain of the author B.K. in his Studies and Observations Group of the United States Special Forces.

They joined those of our subscribers who had read that letter, 88 per cent. Our reliable percentage of our own subscribers reading has since settled at about 50.

Total readers for each new letter have climbed overall. Each of the 8 letters so far this year has found between 240 and 250 readers or views. [Substack has explained the quantity it reports, alternately, both as unique views and as views.]

The first letter this year has reached more than 330 whatever they are, again drawing I think many from another Dunbar number, that of those following the Journal of Vietnamese Studies. Lately, letters have continually reached more readers by attracting them longer.

The letter on Claudia Krich’s Those Who Stayed brought in more views daily from publication on August 11, 2025, until last week, September 24.

Those reading about Claudia seem to have looked back to the previous letter about Peter Zinoman and Nguyễn Nguyệt Cầm’s interview with Trương Huy San a/k/a Huy Đức,

and from Peter and Cầm and Đức to the one about Barney Currer’s The Rabbi.

All 3 letters attracted views at the same rate over the same period. The previous letter to this 1 now, the second on Wayne Karlin’s novel of Israel and the first on James Janko’s novel of Palestine, has not yet shown any trace of attracting readers from other imagined communities.

Hang on. Tuesday, September 30, as I worked on this letter, 1 week after I sent the letter on James and Wayne, that 1 and those on Claudia, Đức, and Barney have started ticking up again.

The sense I make of these numbers is that subscribers to Viet Nam letters are a network of homo sapiens who read around Viet Nam in a world of other networks. Readers have visited from 27 of the United States and 19 of the United Nations.

We are now a stable editorial program with continual readers. Half of them show no interest in any given letter, while half do.

They are different halves each time. In terms of the social theory used in the terror wars, we are a node in a high number of other networks.

Were we terrorists those of you who do not work in some nation’s security would be wearing a hood at a dark site and my home would be a smoking hole. But ours is rather the Dunbar number that counts the members of a Venn intersection in uncounted dimensions of peaceful interest in, for instance,

from our 1st substantial letter (109 views to October 2, 2025)

Dawson’s War, B.K. Marshall, United States Special Forces, Military Assistance Command Vietnam, Studies and Observations Group, Democratic Republic of Viet Nam, People’s Army of Viet Nam, Kingdom of Laos, Republic of Viet Nam, Ha Noi, Saigon,

from the 51st (50 views)

Tradition, Revolution, and the Market Economy in a Vietnamese Village, Hy Van Luong, University of Hawaii Press, anthropology, Vietnamese studies, David Marr, Daniel Ellsberg, and United States Marines,

from the 101st (# views)

du Ciel et des Étoiles, Trịnh Xuân Thuận, astrophysics, University of Virginia, Walter Royal Davis Library, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Dictionnaires amoureux, Plon, Fayard, Algeria, de Gaulle, the Resistance, the Robert, Harold Morowitz, Lucille Morowitz, United States of America, Huynh Sanh Thong, and Tran Duc Thao,

from the 151st (71 views)

Captain Blackman, John A. Williams, Doubleday, M-60, Browning Automatic Rifle, AK-47, Horace, Ars Poetica, a Cabot, Port Hudson, Banks, Hudson, Cailloux, Milliken’s Bend, Robert Gould Shaw, and Poison Springs,

from the 201st (231views)

This Is All I Choose to Tell: History and Hybridity in Vietnamese American Literature, Isabelle Thuy Pelaud, Temple University Press, Linh Dinh, Dan Simon, Seven Stories Press, Fake House, Vietnamese Studies Group, Association for Asian Studies, Night, Again: Contemporary Fiction from Vietnam, Blood and Soap, Love Like Hate, Postcards from the End of America, Bronislaw Malinowski,

from the 251st (136 views)

The Extras, Wayne Karlin, Henry Holt, James Janko, Viet Nam Literature Project, Grace Paley, Maxine Hong Kingston, Albert DeGenova, Standing Feather, Alan Miller, Zuni Mountain Poets, Southeast Asia Studies, Gordon Lish, United States of America, Socialist Republic of Viet Nam, Ha Noi, Vietnamese Communist Party, United States Americans, United States Asians, Palestine, The Wire Walker, Regal House Publishing, What We Don’t Talk About, Orville, Illinois, The Clubhouse Thief, Chicago, Buffalo Boy and Geronimo, Alfred Nobel, Vietnam Veterans Against the War, Free Fire Zone, Henry Kissinger, Lê Đức Thọ, Patrick White, Winston Churchill, People’s Republic of China, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, The Other Side of Heaven, Le Minh Khue, Ho Anh Thai, Chesapeake Bay, Baltimore, Jews, James Duffy, Brandeis, New Haven, Mandatory Palestine, United States Marines, Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, the Great War, Spain, Arabs, the First Intifada, and Grace Isaakovna Ridnyk Paley.

They are all in my head and some of them in part of yours. By reading when you want you fulfill our mission.

By then subscribing, whether paying toward our budget or not, you join a fellowship of reconciliation to recognize Viet Nam in English. We may stay here at the limit of my head alone while continuing to attract a growing number of visitors.

153 is abundant, overflowing, since only 2 or 3 gathered, you reading me writing about reading an author, are all the attention any text needs to entertain the creator, in creation, the imagined kingdom. Blessed be the peacemakers.

We are the children of god. So is everyone else.

Thanks,

Dan

This is the 252nd Viet Nam letter since February 9, 2022. Every letter draws attention to literature in the sense of things to read occasioned by the nation of Viet Nam. Read all about it.

Viet Nam letters respects the property of others under paragraph 107 of United States Code Title 17. If we asked for permission it wouldn’t be criticism. We explain our fair use at length in the letter of September 12, 2022.

The colophon, directly above, shows the janitor speaking with poet David A. Willson on a Veterans Day.

The novelist James Janko commented on that first letter on Wayne’s novel, writing at our Viet Nam Literature Project page on Facebook:

The Extras, which takes place in 1976, is among the great books that helps me understand Palestine and Israel today.

James is a novelist and a poet. Authors write on the covers of each other’s books to flag down their own readers for a colleague.

See the authors and teachers of fiction Grace Paley and Maxine Hong Kingston endorsing one of James’ novels on the left in the photo below. At the right you may read the poets Albert DeGenova and Standing Feather blurb James’ volume of poetry.

All 5 colleagues start with reasons to end with feelings. The effect of their blurbs is affect.

I feel him, these authors tell their readers. If you have felt me you might take him home.

These feelings reveal a face-to-face network of intellect. The first blurb on the left comes from the environmentalist Alan Miller, who lectured on natural resources at Berkeley when James earned his bachelor’s degree in related sciences there.

Maxine taught writing at Berkeley and led a writers’ group for war veterans over those same years. Grace, though an outlier in space and time, from childhood in the Bronx and her own family in the Village then in active retirement at Thetford, Vermont, born 20 years before Alan, James, and Maxine, when living was a militant in the same broad movement with them: nature, peace, and women.

Albert DeGenova is a man of the arts from Chicago, metropolis of James’ native Illinois and the Midwest. He looks to be about my age, born 1960.

Standing Feather is 10 years younger. He and James are comrades of the Zuni Mountain Poets, out of New Mexico.

In studies of Southeast Asia we speak of nations especially after 1945 coming into the world through readers and writers imagining a community. Do you imagine yourself among James and his friends?

Not me, not yet. I did learn to write reading Grace with our editor Gordon Lish then knew her to say hi at meetings to reconcile the United States of America with the Socialist Republic of Viet Nam, where we both knew Ha Noi and the Vietnamese Communist Party.

James and all but 1 of the rest are entirely new to me although our interests would sound the same to any third party in that movement we all belong to. I read what I want when I want.

That is a characteristic of autism. Alternatively, I read every published work by any author mentioned, out of courtesy, to make friends in a world we never made.

I read about Maxine in the trade press ever since she began publishing books from New York last century but I have not yet read her works either although I have followed her generation among United States Americans and Asians closely. James himself has a book set in Palestine published today, September 23, 2025.

The Wire Walker will be his fourth novel published, after What We Don’t Talk About (2022), set in his hometown Orville, Illinois and The Clubhouse Thief (2018), set in Chicago. The first, Buffalo Boy and Geronimo (2006), is set in southern Viet Nam where he went for work both last century and this.

When James wrote, above,

The Extras, which takes place in 1976, is among the great books that helps me understand Palestine and Israel today.

I replied,

Very cool to hear that, and from you. I am about to choose the topic of the next letter so may return to that one. Or another I have in mind: Wayne Karlin for the Nobel.

So here I am writing further about The Extras. First the Nobel, then Wayne, then that novel directly.

Alfred Nobel left the interest from most of his money for 5 prizes made annually since 1901 to those who have benefited our kind. Money had flowed for 30 years already to his patent on dynamite, a stable compound of high explosive.

Dynamite hit harder than gunpowder yet spared workers from handling pure raw volatile nitroglycerin. The labor movement then used dynamite in strikes which saved even more lives in the coal fields and around the world as the militant, prosperous, safer miners heated nations and powered industry and trade with their work.

Alfred’s patent on a safely handled explosive found only brief and passing use among the daring and lethal armies and navies of our world of nations. He was a engineer of commerce not war.

Indeed, the first specified of his 5 prizes is for the person who that year ‘had done the most or best for the fraternization of peoples and the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the formation and promotion of peace congresses.’*

The next 3 of the other 4 prizes are for the person who has made ‘the most important discovery,’ in chemistry, physics, and physiology or medicine.***

The fifth, Alfred’s final prize, goes to ‘the person who within literature has produced excellence /in ideal direction./'*****

That first prize, for peace, is competitive. It goes to the person who has made the most peace that year.

The second, third, and fourth prizes, in 2 physical sciences and 1 of 2 human ones, recognize the advance of knowledge. Whose discovery, if any, has proven most important that year to each of these learned professions?

The fifth recognizes excellence in literature. You have to excel somebody although not everyone as in the prize for peace.

You have to excel in a direction, among the front-runners. The direction has to be ideal, something we aspire to but may not reach.

What ideal? Alfred didn’t specify, but he had started his bequest with the prize for who had done most for

So, Alfred’s own ideals include the abolition or reduction of standing armies. A propos, Wayne’s first book collected short stories by veterans who had separated from the armed services of the United States of America immediately to oppose our war in the Republic of Viet Nam.

Therefore, Wayne led his comrades in reducing a standing army. In that literature he excelled, first out of that gate.

Click on the screen shot above to read the most popular of 9 Viet Nam letters so far on the anthology. Wayne published that first book, Free Fire Zone, the same year the peace talks at Paris concluded, 1973.

The Nobel people awarded that year’s prize to Henry Kissinger and Lê Đức Thọ. Not for literature.

Patrick White got that one. Who?

See, you don’t have to be the world’s most famous writer. You don’t have to be the best either.

Winston fucking Churchill had won it in 1953. Before the battle of Britain the English-speaking world did indeed know Winston first and most as an author of magazine articles and books of adventure.

Then in 1940 his speeches excelled among the fraternity of peoples heading toward ideals. His peers started nominating him after victory in 1945 and didn’t stop until he won for directing the production of a history of that war.

When I got to know Wayne he was editing a collection of fiction from 3 of the 5 nations who had made his war possible. Not the People’s Republic of China or the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, who had backed Ha Noi with arms and men but have not written much about Viet Nam.

The Other Side of Heaven (1995) became another first past the post. Once again Wayne had excelled in an ideal direction, whether or not you share my preference for both anthologies above all that have followed his lead.

His collaboration across last century and this with the Ha Noi novelists Le Minh Khue and Ho Anh Thai to bring out in English the fiction of their peers in the SRVN is without precedent or rival here in the USA or anywhere in the world.

All the while, his own books as author have appeared regularly. They excel in representing with the ideal of candor unspeakable disasters: his war for Viet Nam; the extermination of his mother’s Jews of Europe previously; and before that the arrival of enslaved Africans and indentured English to the already-settled Chesapeake.

Where my father’s people were autochthonous if not indigenous. My grandfather the poacher paid my senior uncle’s school fees netting carp for the gefilte fish of Baltimore, then Jews gave James, the Africanist, a job founding Brandeis where his colleagues educated my father who went on to practice law with Jews in New Haven.

The Extras addressed in 1989 the struggle for what had been Mandatory Palestine across more than 25 years before April of 1948 as a novel of espionage, the secret world where ideals are for deceiving others and yourself. Israeli security runs a veteran of 1967 and 1973 against his comrade leading a peace movement in 1976, while an insurgency runs an Arab Israeli, his childhood friend now a love interest, as a terrorist.

Both spymasters work to compromise and recruit the man and woman rather than to accomplish any stated goal. It’s a United States Marine view of secret squirrels.

I am not the only reader who has written that the beauty of the novel lies in description of forbidden Palestine now mandatory Israel. The story is riddled with sentences like the second of Farewell to Arms,

In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels.

and the second and third of For Whom the Bell Tolls.

The mountainside sloped gently where he lay; but below it was steep and he could see the dark of the oiled road winding through the pass. There was a stream alongside the road and far down the pass he saw a mill beside the stream and the falling water of the dam, white in the summer sunlight.

That is Ernest Hemingway practicing Imagism. He learned it, by the way, from a Jew, Gertrude Stein, and from the engaged, militant Jew-hater, Ezra Pound.

Anyone can do it if you are willing to work. Here is Wayne:

The slope wasn’t steep and didn’t drop very far until it flattened into a smooth blister of rock, a roughly circular center for the whorls of the country. The blister was bordered on the left by low brown hills and rimmed on the other side by more jagged formations that looked like sand castles brushed by waves, their tops wider than their bases. There were a few date palms in front of them, their fronds covered with yellow dust and hanging limply, like the legs of impaled spiders.

The writing is polished agate but without an igneous rock in sight. We read rather about the weathering of metamorphics back into sediments.

You know, like Israel. Like Palestine.

Wayne doesn’t say that. Whenever someone in this novel says something that sounds like it might mean something, for instance,

“Maybe all our uncles have to die in the wilderness - before we can build the promised land.”

the speaker or the one spoken to says,

“Or maybe that’s just poetry.”

Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls are just poetry in that absence of sense. You read Ernest for imagism.

If Ernest knew anything about his Great War or the really awful one for Spain, he didn’t say. In life he engaged as a militant against fascism but ever since then fascist readers have enthusiastically identified with his heroes, without impediment from the text.

You read Wayne for the story. It’s full of impediments.

That lapidary passage above is not the beginning, as in any of Ernest’s novels. Wayne starts with his Israeli protagonist arriving at a movie set, itself inside a refugee camp, where Arab day laborers will represent Hebrews enslaved in Egypt.

No one who cares about Arabs and Jews is going to choke that down and assimilate it. It’s not pretty.

It’s not your story, in English, outside Israel. The imagism, the running joke about poetry, and this story all command attention while invoking a forum to contest interpretation, as at court.

Hear ye, hear ye. Our sergeant at arms convened these proceedings as the first intifada began.

Wayne had not joined Israel, as I had not. My own reason was that I would not pull constabulary duty in a civil war and I could not imagine joining a nation without serving at their pleasure.

James did pull constabulary duty in the war between Ha Noi and Saigon, the 2 Viet Nams. I will learn what he has made of them when I read his Viet Nam book.

His family name is always Slavic, sometimes Jewish, more often from a nation of our enemies. If James isn’t a Jew still he is a friend of our Grace Isaakovna Ridnyk Paley, Jew, Slav, and original White Anglo Saxon Protestant by marriage to a Nichols of Massachusetts.

Grace and James alike American as apple pie. Patriots of our nation who leveled Berlin then made the rubble bounce while the women and children burned and froze and starved.

I won’t have to wonder long what nation James makes of the land of Israel and what community he has imagined after reading The Extras. His novel of Palestine came out today:

This is the 251st Viet Nam letter since February 9, 2022. Every letter draws attention to literature in the sense of things to read occasioned by the nation of Viet Nam. Read all about it.

Viet Nam letters respects the property of others under paragraph 107 of United States Code Title 17. If we asked for permission it wouldn’t be criticism. We explain our fair use at length in the letter of September 12, 2022.

The colophon, directly above, shows the janitor speaking with poet David A. Willson on a Veterans Day.

Nothing made me special. Nothing protected me.

While I was pregnant we had a patient named Ly who had lost her leg to a landmine. […S]he was there with only her three-year-old daughter, Lan.

I quickly learned that Lan was very sick with a rash and a high fever.

The next day that beautiful little girl’s fever was higher.

She became delirious, and then she died. A few days after I visited them at the hospital, I was sick with a rash and fever myself.

After fifty hours of futile labor,

The next day they brought him to us in large glass jar.

The doctors asked where we would bury him.

But there, somehow, they lost him.

Claudia was a friend of Paul and of Timothy. Not my older and next younger brother but the apostle and the saint.

I am Daniel. I read the writing on this wall.

A krich is a kirk, not the starship commander but a church or the Church, Krich in the German language we speak at Berlin and Kirk in the one we speak at Edinburgh. Claudia Krich and her husband directed the American Friends Service Committee clinic at Quang Ngai at the center of the ground war between two cities for one country over the bodies of the people, from early 1973 until the Republic of Viet Nam disbanded in 1975.

The clinic rehabilitated wounded refugees. The American Friends are of the Society of Friends, the church who owned and governed Pennsylvania, Christians who have led in business and government there and nationally ever since.

To visit the sick is the fifth of the first 7 works of mercy which the Krich broadly speaking, the body of Christ, has enumerated from his stories of virgins, sheep, and goats at Matthew 25, the word of god. To shelter the homeless is number 4.

Just after my fifteenth birthday, aged 27, the week she would have given birth to her son, 3 months after losing him, Claudia moved office to the capital in the chaos and panic as the People’s Army took the Republic. In Saigon, she kept her head while so many set each other’s hair on fire and fled into the sea.

She instead remained past the fall of the government and the liberation of the city on April 30 through the first week of July. She kept a diary.

Now she has gathered those entries together into a book, what bible means, a new testament. Claudia Krich is instructing the ignorant.

That is the first of the second 7 works of mercy, of spiritual mercy. She begins by grabbing your humanity in the story above, about the last of the first 7 works, of corporal mercy, to bury the dead.

We have got a witness. For what we are about to receive, may the Lord make us truly thankful and keep us always mindful of the needs of others.

This is the 250th Viet Nam letter since February 9, 2022. Every letter draws attention to literature in the sense of things to read occasioned by the nation of Viet Nam. Read all about it.

Viet Nam letters respects the property of others under paragraph 107 of United States Code Title 17. If we asked for permission it wouldn’t be criticism. We explain our fair use at length in the letter of September 12, 2022.

The colophon, directly above, shows the janitor speaking with poet David A. Willson on a Veterans Day.

Second thought reckoned that was the law of small numbers talking as when the utility pole on the cover of Huy Đức’s history of the unified nation reminded me of the streetscapes of the world’s favorite Vietnamese painter and the first word of that book’s title echoed to me and no one else who reads Vietnamese the first word of the 1 novel I have read front to back in that language.

I have examined in archives, subscribed to, or written for 1 dozen of the hundreds of dozens of journals of Viet Nam worldwide since they started when my grandparents were born. Of my dozen, Hợp Lưu is the 1 whose covers the Journal of Vietnamese Studies resembles at all.

But the palette of this exemplar is subdued, not bold as I recall those Hợp Lưu covers of đổi mới. The work represented shows a draped human bust with botanical ornaments, while the paintings I recollect on covers of Hợp Lưu of that day represented only themselves. Even about themselves they said nothing.

Lovely as I see a woman casting down her eyes, romantic as I find that tubercular flux from a mouth almost vanishing, arrested as I am by dead flowers above and below her ear, this painting interrupts my examination with a medical mask crumpled into the paint. Then the artist spells out its meaning in a caption.

You don’t have to gaze at it in a chat box next to the work as at a gallery show. You take in the cover, you open the journal and read. I found Ann Phong’s caption to her work where the cover credit belongs in a book.

I Am Not A Virus (Pandemic Time) 2021

No, she isn’t. She does carry a viral load, whether on the cover of the journal or on the original work of art, or in the artist or any model.

But no person is a virus. Ann is an United States American, born in Saigon like so many among us, yet her declaration is the revolutionary Vietnamese view of the relation of the individual to the microbiome of our species.

When the nation of Viet Nam was a dream, young men and women from France’s protectorate of Tonkin travelled to the research and teaching hospitals of Paris where in medical training they joined the Pasteur movement for public health. Some then ran away from France into the woods north of Ha Noi where for instance they taught their comrades of the Viet Minh to serve from the common bowl with the thick end of the chopsticks only then eat only from the other ends.

A firm grasp on the germ theory of disease has long been a distinctive practice in the medicine bundle of Viet Nam, as anti-race science and participant observation have been among anthropologists. How long?

Throughout the fuss and bother of anticolonialism north versus south and ever since, the unschooled people of dead center Viet Nam have venerated the tomb of the citizen of France who isolated the plague bacillus and devised a serum, outside Nha Trang. Because they practice proper relations.

The Vietnamese caught their robust germ theory in the family. You join a social movement like the Pasteur one after you already sympathize with it.

That first article in the first page of the table of contents, just below, at the right, considers how families take the benefits of the clinic on their own terms. Theirs is an attitude towards life, the biosphere, that does not track onto commie bullshit or the new world order.

The Party did adopt a Maoist line against medical expertise when Beijing was funding their war with Saigon. Then after victory the chuckleheads drove Chinese-speaking families out of the nation saying that they were an infection, but the government just wanted money.

Commies will say anything for money, so don’t listen to them but watch what they do. When the People’s Republic at Beijing later fostered SARS by denying it, the Socialist Republic at Ha Noi shut the virus down with quarantine.

The events of 2020, particularly the pandemic and the rise in Anti-Asian hate incidents, have prompted me to reconsider America’s multicultural identity, revealing underlying inequalities and injustices in our society.

Ann’s caption to I Am Not A Virus speaks from California, our most populous and prosperous state, where she is a product and now a cadre of their system of 116 community colleges, 23 four-year colleges, and 10 research universities. She started as an adult at Pomona, earned her terminal degree at Fullerton, then returned to her alma mater where she has nourished and uplifted students all over the state from around the world.

The Socialist Republic of Viet Nam had denied her conservatory training twice after she graduated from high school around 1975 when her Republic fell and 1976 when the SRVN unified. I have not yet found that she had the wrong class background, born neither to farmworkers or to revolutionaries, but that is the way to bet.

The Vietnamese arriving in the United States of America fleeing for their lives from the fall of Saigon then from hunger which means starvation in their mother tongue under collective agriculture and the command economy over 2 of the world’s biggest rice bowls were a middle class: clerks, technicians, managers, executives, professionals. Most refugees from anywhere to here have been, because you need means to escape.

Many a Vietnamese paid for a boat and was captured and returned a dozen times, then found the gold to run 1 more time. 1 large fraction, Roman Catholics, already had fled south from the Communists, recouped their means for 20 years, then fled again east overseas.

A second large fraction, the Chinese speakers, fled SRVN exactly because they were no-kidding bourgeois, merchants targeted by the Vietnamese Communist Party for immiseration. Most of the first Vietnamese here joined our middle class in the sense that you go to school and get a job, buy a piece of the country and invest your retirement in the New York Stock Exchange.

We had first settled them around the country, out of the way, in small numbers, to avoid any unpleasantness after our civil war about theirs. But they fled a second or third time, west to California, where they both made Westminster in Orange County a Vietnamese city and assimilated with all the other flavors throughout the entire state, through its mighty colleges building the strong economy.

It’s a great story. You can see how an artist and teacher in this success of our society after our great disaster and theirs could have forgotten what country she was in, on what planet.

The reproduction of the painting I Am Not A Virus on the cover of this number of the Journal of Vietnamese Studies refers not as Ann’s caption does to the USA but to 7 of the 18 contributions listed in the 2 pages of the table of contents. All 7 discuss that same COVID-19 pandemic instead in Viet Nam, in light of the Rescue Flights show trial that followed in Ha Noi.

As the pandemic started SRVN had sent a plane full of supplies to the People’s Republic to help out big brother, who had not planned on the agency of germs. On the way back the plane repatriated a load of Vietnamese stranded overseas, into quarantine of course.

Rescue went over so well that officials started shaking down fabulous sums from the stranded and their carriers. Then the government had a trial to show how vigilant they are against corruption.

I had never heard of any of it. I read the whole roundtable on the scandal as news.

What colleagues are for, to lend serious consideration to affairs you had ignored as trivial. I have read news in Vietnamese every day since late last century but I don’t pay attention to their government, their party, and their nonsense.

As maybe you have blown by the painting on the cover of a scholarly journal. Diligent, I chastened my boredom with the VCP and their SRVN as an object of study by respectful attention to the work of 6 younger brothers and sisters.

Martha Lincoln, bearing the personal name of our revolutionary first lady and the family name of our president of unification, medical anthropologist at the immigrant gateway university in San Francisco, set the roundtable. Dương Quốc Chính, a man of the Web in Vietnamese, gave the straight story on the scandal, in Alex-Thái Đình Võ’s translation.

Australian Giang Nguyen-Thu passed along the fun that Tik-Tokers in Viet Nam had with the trial. Tuong Vu, political scientist at Oregon, our state founded not merely in white rule but excluding black Americans, explained exhaustively the social science that distinguishes gangsters from government.

Alex-Thái selflessly edited the entire presentation. I enjoyed riotously the final contribution, “Life is Long and Messy,” from the Berlin author Phạm Thị Hoài.

She is just my age, a few years younger than Ann. Hoài views a government trial on government corruption in a single-party state as I do.

Around the world, our close contemporaries don’t suffer fools. We benefited from the historical experience of the older brothers and sisters, who suffered great fools and suffered greatly under them.

We are strongly represented in Vietnamese studies, both the journal and the social movement. Peter Zinoman who founded the journal was born between my third and fourth brother.

Peter started translating Hoài not long after she began publishing, when đổi mới was young and so were we. Huy Đức started publishing then too, after his wars beating back China and saving Cambodia from the Khmer Rouge and their backer the USA.

He is five years younger than Ann, a couple years younger than me and Hoài, 1 year older than my second brother, and a few years older than Peter. He was the child of a collective farm and a teenager then a man of the People’s Army where his duties were those of our special forces, spotting targets and training allies.

He left the service for journalism. He reported candidly and skeptically from his close ties to the establishment as the nation’s new life unfolded.

Then in mid-life he wrote a history without bullshit of the SRVN from its birth in victory in 1975 and unification in 1976. Click on the photo above to read Peter’s introduction to his 2013 interview in California with his friend about his life and work, just after the history appeared on the Web.

Huy Đức was heading home into jeopardy. Peter and Nguyễn Nguyệt Cầm, Vietnamese-language editor of the journal, debriefed this forward observer as he ran once more to the sound of the guns.

That is a traditional role here in area studies, where scholars and scientists talk to partisans on their way in and out. The interview is touching.

It recalls Socrates refusing exile while his friends took notes. Perhaps Peter and Cầm stood ready to bring out his life story that year should police lead Huy Đức into custody off the plane.

They didn’t. The old soldier had another 10 years running reconnaissance and organizing partisans as a special operator in occupied territory, defending the forests of the mountains to the west and islands of the eastern sea, while reconciling Vietnamese veterans of the republics at Ha Noi and Saigon to one another in the new life of the nation.

The hammer came down at last in June 2024. Peter chose to publish the interview in solidarity last November.

This February 2025 the SRVN sentenced the journalist, already incarcerated, to 30 months. Huy Đức is not a virus but his government has put him in quarantine.

The social movement of Vietnamese studies, advancing in a body of knowledge at home and worldwide, an army of people, have objected to this bad medicine. All the 25 names I count in the table of contents are conspirators in this resistance to the VC and their grasp on the SRVN.

Solidarity forever:

This is the 249th Viet Nam letter since February 9, 2022. Of them, 2 letters have addressed Peter Zinoman’s introduction to his interview of Huy Đức with Nguyễn Nguyệt Cầm: first on January 4, 2025 and second on February 5, 2025.

Every Viet Nam letter draws attention to literature in the sense of things to read occasioned by the nation of Viet Nam. Read all about it.

Viet Nam letters respects the property of others under paragraph 107 of United States Code Title 17. If we asked for permission it wouldn’t be criticism. We explain our fair use at length in the letter of September 12, 2022.

The colophon, directly above, shows the janitor speaking with poet David A. Willson on a Veterans Day.

The Times in London developed it and the New York Times used it. The English-speaking world read about the Gulf of Tonkin incident and the Paris peace talks in that serif font.

You may glance above and read the title of this Viet Nam letter in a font without serifs, a sans serif font. Examine the text in the photograph below where also you will find no serif.

Basil T. Paquet’s First Casualty Press made Free Fire Zone in 1973 without serifs. 17 years later Kali Tal also designed and typeset her first collection of scholarship from Vietnam Generation, Inc. without serifs. Many English-language publishers in the last quarter of the twentieth century in the United States of America set 1 book, their first, in a sans serif font.

Sans looks clean and new. It is bold and clear for reading captions and titles word for word, as above to define FREE FIRE ZONE and to remark with Aeschylus that in war truth is the first casualty.

In the 1970s and 80s a sans serif font wasn’t the New York Times with more bullshit about grabass at Paris. It was for names and numbers as on ticker tape.

By that same token the reader can’t look ahead at the right-hand page in sans while still interpreting the left-hand page, eyes ahead of the brain, reading the horizon as we have since first we stood up on the savannah. You have to lean over the ticker watching the tape.

I bet that Ben, by George Davis, when it appeared in his Random House novel Coming Home, in 1971, and The Interrogation of Prisoner Bung by Mister Hawkins and Sergeant Tree that same year in Esquire magazine’s January issue, and Candidate by James Shield in the Spring issue, 1972, of Carolina Quarterly, all had serifs as they don’t at their appearance with First Casualty, in Free Fire Zone.

That is why I owned this book 30 years before I took it all in. The sans of 1 book stopped me while I was running through whole libraries and their catalogues in serif.

Now I read like a rabbi. I make haste slowly.

The Rabbi

By Barney Currer

Even Sergeant Coates, who had originated the nickname, was not really sure why Lieutenant Rowan was staying in Vietnam.

Who is The Rabbi? This story circles around that mystery and 1 other.

We do know what The Rabbi is. First, it is the name of a story.

Second, The Rabbi’s first sentence tells us that it is a “nickname” and that Sergeant Coates “originated” it. “Originated” is an odd usage.

We usually say that soldiers “called” or “named” a buddy to his face or an officer behind his back. Sometimes, archly, “christened.”

That would not be a propos for The Rabbi. The newspaper usage “dubbed” would serve, as one dubs a knight, an officer. Why instead “originated?”

“Originated” recalls Genesis, the creation of man and his lonesome naming of the other creatures. Who is using that word?

Barney Currer, it says there. At the back of the book it says William J. (Barney) Currer. Is he a rabbi?

Not likely. Could be a Jew by the matriline, how rabbis have reckoned. Mary Alice Sherman Miller gave birth in 1921 to Lucie Cecelia Miller who gave birth in 1945 to William John (Barney) Currer.

Both Sherman and Miller are family names common among Jews here. But the search engine didn’t find either mother declaring her faith, or any rabbi anywhere named Currer.

The search engine did find the Reverend William John Currer, born in 1870, father of the William John (Barney) Currer of 1921, in turn father of our William John (Barney) Currer of 1945. The father and grandfather of the Reverend William John Currer of 1870 immigrated from Scotland, whose people the Americans of their day mocked as cheap, same as they did Jews.

But, I am guessing, there is no rabbi in the byline. Our man was the son of a California lawyer who argued in federal appeals court there against the enforcement of a food and drug regulation upon a corporation. A Nixon man, I am guessing.

That year, 1970, his son was in Viet Nam. 3 years later, Junior, who did not call himself that, as his father had called himself, published a short story with an anti-war press. Obituaries for the father and son of the same name do not mention each other.

But they both called themselves Barney. That is a diminutive, often Polish here, used it seems to me as comic, ethnic, minstrelsy, transgressive fun by the Currer family of Iowa and California just as the birth family of Dwight David Eisenhower in Texas and Kansas used Ike, short for Isaac, the son of the father of the Jews, Abraham.

Abe for short. That is the only first name we get for Lieutenant Rowan, known in The Rabbi as Rabbi. Author Barney and character Abe, it seems to me, fit as different among the goyim of the United States Army. Abraham Lincoln the second father of the USA had commissioned the first rabbi as an Army chaplain 1 hundred years before.

Jews had arrived in the New World as Roman Catholics among the Portuguese and Spanish, long before the Mayflower pilgrims. We came out as Jews with rabbis over the same years as the founding of the Comanche and the Lakota nations and their rival the USA.

We have made our place here ever since, representing something different. Sergeant Coates called Lieutenant Rowan The Rabbi to remark on Abe’s egregious desire to remain in the Republic of Viet Nam.

That is the mystery suggested by the nickname. Sergeant Coates meant it to assert, in his frontier way, that maybe Abe stayed for the money but that his sergeant wasn’t sure.

A rabbi isn’t a Jew in that sense, even in old-time Army speech. They called any money man simply a Jew, or a kike, in the speech of the yids. Richard Milhous Nixon was that kind of Jew in the Navy, a Quaker who came home from the Pacific with a stake he won from officers less careful about money.

Lieutenant Rowan was just cheap, saving his paycheck like a Scot in an English joke, not a man of business. So his poor black or white subordinate called him a rabbi. The abiding mystery of the story is why was this lieutenant staying in Viet Nam.

The Rabbi

By Barney Currer

Even Sergeant Coates, who had originated the nickname, was not really sure why Lieutenant Rowan was staying in Vietnam.

So ends the reading for today, the second Viet Nam letter on The Rabbi and the ninth on Free Fire Zone.

This is the 248th letter since February 9, 2022. The first Viet Nam letter on Free Fire Zone was the 17th of them all, on March 21, 2022.

That was also our first on The Rabbi and Barney Currer and 1st Casualty Press. Click on the photo above to read it.

Every Viet Nam letter draws attention to literature in the sense of things to read occasioned by the nation of Viet Nam. Read all about it.

Viet Nam letters respects the property of others under paragraph 107 of United States Code Title 17. If we asked for permission it wouldn’t be criticism. We explain our fair use at length in the letter of September 12, 2022.

The colophon, directly above, shows the janitor speaking with poet David A. Willson on a Veterans Day.

CHILD REFUGEE

The president of the United States of America cast all law aside to welcome those whose republic fell at Saigon on April 30, 1975. Our navy already had steamed from Guam to the rescue.

Over that final quarter of my native century our congress passed act after act making the decency of Gerald Ford and our captains legal. Not every landed immigrant has taken advantage of the opportunity to become a citizen.

The reconciliation of the USA with the Socialist Republic of Viet Nam in the last decade of that century allowed us to deport those refuseniks. We began after the September 11 attacks and have accelerated through the first quarter of this century.

US MARINE

Nobody is going to deport the author. If his people didn’t sign him up with us as a child then service in the United States Marine Corps would have provided another royal road from ward to adult and guest to citizen.

BIOTECH CEO

A chief executive officer is a civilian. In the armed services an executive officer is a role played by the immediate junior to the commanding officer.

Both executive and commanding officer are roles, not ranks. In a publicly traded corporation the executive officer would be the chief operating officer.

That is a rank, as is chief executive officer. That officer’s role is to speak to the public who trade in the shares of the corporation.

People who do not trade in shares learned of the role of CEO over the career of Bill Gates of Microsoft Corporation across the fourth quarter of my native century beginning, what do you know, in 1975. Bill built and defended a common platform for personal computers, as John Rockefeller had done for oil.

Kings of their hills, John and Bill told their publics what to do. There is no common platform in bio-technology.

A BIOTECH CEO is more like a CHILD REFUGEE, intrepid, and a US MARINE, confident. Not some guy you must obey but a captain, a president you follow out of chaos.

QUANG X. PHAM

I like the X. What the followers of Elijah Muhammad, an entrepreneur in religion for self-help, take when they cast off the slave name.

You could call all Vietnamese names slave names when they aren’t royal ones. The Nguyen, Tran, and Le dynasties supply the 3 most common Vietnamese family names.

PHAM, the fourth, is a lineage of defeated Champa, now central Viet Nam, at whose frontier the national leaders come from, for instance both Ho Chi Minh of the Socialist Republic of Viet Nam formerly known as Democratic and Ngo Dinh Diem of the defunct Republic of Viet Nam. QUANG, the personal name, is one of those given to a boy to recognize inherent moral quality, in this case clear and bright.

Buzzard? Hawk?

We were wondering that very question this morning as a pair of silhouettes just like that one on the cover circled in the sky over the gulley at the corner. Usually, on our block, when you see feathers spread like fingers it is the scavenger but their glide this morning seemed more like predators’.

Then they started to scream. Yup, hawks.

This raptor on the book cover has got to be the totem of the USA. The bald eagle, of course, who hunts when they can’t steal prey from other hunters, when they can’t scavenge.

Man in a suit with a briefcase

A CEO doesn’t carry anything, as a naval captain does not. That is a salesman on his way to soar with the eagle.

Pawn

The pharmaceutical representative stands on 1 of 16 commoners in the game of 2 kings. Not climbing on and over the pawn in the corporate manner but rather in transformation as Peter Benjamin Parker dons the suit of the Amazing Spider-Man and

Dr. Robert Bruce Banner swells to the Incredible Hulk. But where Peter and Robert suffer abrupt, accidental dysregulation that sends each man on the run from the law, the pawn in chess soldiers across the board, deliberate and resolute, to become in plain view:

Queen.

I was surprised to learn while fact-checking this essay that the game says you may instead choose to transform the pawn into bishop, knight, or rook. I had not heard about those possibilities because queen is the piece we choose, to strike at any distance in any direction, like an eagle.

A sovereign, like the president. Well, a viceroy acting for the king as the captain of a naval ship does at sea.

ZERO IN ON EFFORT AND RESULTS FOR SUCCESS

That is the message. I would call it the subtitle, under-title, but here it is over the title. Super-title!

UNDERDOG NATION

That slashing red font baffles me. It comes from the cover of the longtime bestseller Helter Skelter, prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi’s study of the criminal Charles Manson, who had interpreted the Beatles’ song as a call for race war.

What? UNDERDOG means nothing like that.

If you were watching cartoons Saturday mornings from 1964 through 1973, what do you know, from UNDERDOG Saigon raiding the Chinese boats at Hon Me island, to UNDERDOG Le Duc Tho refusing his Nobel, you may recall the theme song:

Speed of lightning, roar of thunder
Fighting all who rob or plunder
UNDERDOG. UNDERDOG!

This mock heroism captures the dignity of the UNDERDOG, not cruel or proud but determined. It does not capture my own experience down by the ravine, with the canine UNDERDOG I rescued just as my top dog began to eviscerate him.

Is that what the book designer meant to convey?

Forbes Books

I feel sure they meant something by the title font, as they did with all these other legends and symbols I read on the cover just now. Quang’s publishing partner develops a business book in collaboration with a leader to get a message out.

The Forbes family and magazines have cheered on enterprise since, what do you know, 1917 when our side first sent men in suits with briefcases to Moscow and St. Petersburg to promote capitalism. They know what they are doing.

Viet Nam letters has addressed the work of other CHILD REFUGEES. See for instance this first of the 2 so far on Sigh, Gone by Phuc Tran, also the third of 4 so far on Jonathan Hill and his Lizard Boy.

We have published many many Viet Nam letters about the works of US MARINES. Most of them concern Wayne Karlin, like Quang a helicopter Marine, as author or editor.

Many Viet Nam letters concern BIOTECH. This 1 starts on Arthur Galston, inventor and nemesis of dioxin.

Viet Nam letters respects the property of others under paragraph 107 of United States Code Title 17. If we asked for permission it wouldn’t be criticism. We explain our fair use at length in the letter of September 12, 2022.

The colophon of these Viet Nam letters, directly above, shows the janitor speaking with poet David A. Willson on a Veterans Day.

Walker Books US of the Candlewick Press in Somerville, Massachusetts, bedroom community of Harvard and Lesley universities and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has birthed a twin to the first novel.

Both measure exactly 6, by 8 and 1 half, by 11 sixteenths inches. The twins are not quite identical.

Similar colors, but 2 different colorists. Similar story, still in middle school, with nearly all the same crypto-zoological young people, but a different drama.

You could call the first Lizard Boy a tragedy even though it ends happily, because the story shows the protagonist achieving insight. He learns to accept himself.

This second Lizard Boy is a comedy, often funny, but always comedic, with a couple dozen dramatis personae struggling to establish a moral order. An abandoned theater full of crypto-zoological families and 1 robot from the future learn to accept each other as their world turns upside down.

Then together they right it. Read together, the series of 2 novels so far is tragicomic art, what do you know, from a comics artist.

3 Viet Nam letters have addressed Tales of a Seventh-Grade Lizard Boy. That first tale in this series of 2 is fraught, a first novel full of the author’s life to date in its own dream logic. I unpacked what I know of that life and logic in the first and second Viet Nam letters on the book.

Both tales of the Lizard Boy show a moral quality that is more stern than I expect from a fiction promoting pride and tolerance in our brave new world of many origins. I take it that Eagle Valley lies in the hinterlands of Jonathan Hill’s Portland, Oregon.

I recall that Yankees settled Oregon free of black Americans, while driving out the incumbents as they had from New England then barring the rest of the Pacific Rim. That refugees from the Cold War and then the terror wars have now in their turn settled that state once again at long last in an inclusive manner is good news.

From North Carolina, I wonder if that news is aspirational. A story for children in the sense of Walt and Roy Disney, rather than Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm.

From Viet Nam, I am convinced instead by a sense of bravery and proper relations both in the tragic and the comic Lizard Boy that the author and I each attribute to his uncle Phuc, an author himself as well as a character in the comic books, under the name Dung.

Read all about him.

Viet Nam letters respects the property of others under paragraph 107 of United States Code Title 17. If we asked for permission it wouldn’t be criticism. We explain our fair use at length in the letter of September 12, 2022.

The colophon of these Viet Nam letters, directly above, shows the janitor speaking with poet David A. Willson on a Veterans Day.

Bên thắng cuộc. That first word, Bên, also comes first in the first sentence of the first chapter of Cõi đêm, a novel by Nguyễn Ngọc Ngạn which I have read hard.

Bên ngoài, trời dã sáng lắm. Outside, it was bright already. Alternatively:

Over there, it was already morning. Bên means side, whether inside and outside, left and right, sides of a family or an ocean.

In the novel, a man returned from Canada with no morals is snoring in a Saigon hotel room. Remarkably, while his author has maintained for 50 years that no Vietnamese who has fled should return,

in his 1991 novel this stern anti-communist lampooned a selfish thoughtless refugee wreaking havoc among the decent hardworking people of the Socialist Republic of Viet Nam. The sun is high and the fool is out cold in bed.

Where? Bên thắng cuộc.

In Vietnamese we capitalize the first letter only of a book title, as we also do in French. In English: The Winning Side.

Where? Bên ngoài. Over there, Cõi đêm, the Country of Night.

The law of small numbers yielded my association from the title of Huy Đức’s history to the first word of Nguyễn Ngọc Ngạn’s novel. I know few Vietnamese words and have read few books in that language.

Has anyone made a more deliberate and informed association of the journalist and the novelist? I asked the search engine.

The critic Thiên Hoàng has broadcast separately on Huy Đức’s history and also on an article of the same title from Nguyễn Ngọc Ngạn, published in April, 2015.

Both Huy Đức’s history and Ngạn’s remarks have occasioned many podcasts. What audio and text commentaries have communicated to me is that both authors are social realists with a moral eye on the country since the fall of Saigon.

Beyond that, I am the only reader I am aware of who has associated the 2 men. Ngạn himself, writing 3 years after Huy Đức’s book appeared in print, does not mention it.

Go figure. The cover photo leaped to my eye as well.

In silhouette, the top half of a utility pole with comms wire, power cables, resistors, a street lamp, and 2 public address speakers. Looking from here you may see in silhouette 1 of our creosote-soaked wooden masts.

No. Over there they cast a utility pole in cement.

You may see them all over Viet Nam and around the world in the paintings of Bùi Xuân Phái. I take photographs around my Durham, North Carolina neighborhood of our hollow steel poles, in Phái’s manner: with few human figures in what is in life a densely populated area.

I looked at the cover of the first volume of Huy Đức’s book and I saw first my favorite Vietnamese author and the world’s favorite Vietnamese painter. Law of small numbers.

I also have an eye for emptiness and error, sin and sorrow. Oh hey.

Look: my copy of the Journal of Vietnamese Studies with Peter B. Zinoman’s Interview with Trương Huy San (Huy Đức) has arrived!

The previous Viet Nam letter, of January 4, 2025, was our first on historian Peter Zinoman’s introduction to the Journal of Vietnamese Studies’ publication this year of his interview in 2013 with journalist Huy Đức. Click on the image below for a direct link to that letter.

We have published 6 Viet Nam letters on the novel Cõi đêm by Nguyễn Ngọc Ngạn. Click on the image below to the first letter, which offers links to the next five.

Viet Nam letters respects the property of others under paragraph 107 of United States Code Title 17. If we asked for permission it wouldn’t be criticism. We explain our fair use at length in the letter of September 12, 2022.

The colophon of these Viet Nam letters, directly below, shows the janitor speaking with poet David A. Willson on a Veterans Day.