Video: Let There Be Light (John Huston’s 1946 documentary about PTSD)
The film was intended to educate the public about post-traumatic stress disorder and its treatment among returning veterans, but its unscripted presentation of mental disability caused the U.S. government to suppress the film.
Doug Anderson: Memorial Day
It’s only old Herman sitting a few yards off in the recliner
who looks beyond them into a burning village where a marine
drags a wounded man by his heels behind a tank for cover
and the tank backs up and runs over them both.
Thomas McGuire: Garden Plots
I’ve come to half believe what Ho Chi Minh
said about his need for more poets
who could lead a charge, sharpen bayonets.
Adam Patric Miller: Labyrinth
in the yellow light of that narrow
carpeted hallway that led to my parents’
bedroom. there was a photo of
my great-grandfather Nestor Dreyfus
whose face escaped into my mother’s face
Andrea Mazzarino: Broken Heart Syndrome in Trump’s America
I’m the wife of a U.S. military veteran and the mother of children who have been encouraged by those in our family and community to become fighters “like Daddy.”
Richard Hoffman: Mourning Gaza
What does the pale infant turning to dust
in the gray light deep in the powdery rubble know
of the torn hands of her parents digging to find her?
Richard Krawiec: The Eyes of Hiroshima
My father was a sailor in the first group of ships to land in Hiroshima after the atomic bombs were dropped in WWII.
Michael Simms: Blowtorch Bob And Other Particulars Of My Politics
In 1970 I went to my first anti-war demonstration. I was sixteen and my cousin Michael Ashie (People introduced us as “This is my friend Michael and this is his … Continue reading
Mike Vargo: Is There a Real Me?
Believing in a real self would be easier if the self were not so inconsistent.
Chard deNiord: The Silence
an elegy for a child or parent or sibling
or friend who’s died at the hand
of the enemy whose God is the same
monotheistic deity with a different name
Andrea Mazzarino: Americans in Pain
Confronting the Phantom Limbs of America’s Foreign Wars
Nneka M. Okona: The Imposition of Black Grief
For Black people in the United States, grief and loss are intertwined with our very being. Our ancestors knew the trauma of loss intimately…
Wayne Karlin: The Lotus Eaters
And so he returned to Ithaca:
walked naked from the sea
and saw his shadow
fall on the white marble
Jennifer Brookland: Holding On When Leaving Feels Like Letting Go
I spent four years in the military and remember it in fuzzy flashes. The little I do recall leaves me with a vague sense of awkward incompetence, confusion, and shame.
