It took me 14 years to write poems about Vietnam. I had never thought about writing about it, and in a way I had been systematically writing around it.
If I took the 40 years of my dad talking to me about war and battles and taking me to battlefields and distilled it down into one question, it would probably be the idea of the necessary or unnecessary war.
I covered the Vietnam War. I remember the lies that were told, the lives that were lost - and the shock when, twenty years after the war ended, former Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara admitted he knew it was a mistake all along.
My younger brother's death in Vietnam was both sobering and cause for reflection. In 'Fallen Angels' I wanted to dispel the notion of war as either romantic or simplistically heroic.
Wars have no memory, and nobody has the courage to understand them until there are no voices left to tell what happened.
War is complicated and intense, and it takes time and thoughts to understand what it was.
Many of the best films made about war have come out after the wars have ended. People need a period of time to reflect on them.
The slaying of multitudes should be mourned with sorrow. A victory should be celebrated with the funeral rite.
