Setting out to honor the memory of Steve Warner (pictured above), our Vietnam unit's lone fallen comrade, on Memorial Day in 1971 proved to be a lot harder than it should have been. As I remember it, there were at least two major obstacles...

Norbert Blei -- writer, teacher, editor, publisher, and artist -- died late last month in Door County, Wisconsin. It would take several blogs to do him justice, so I won't even try. But I will try to explain his substantial impact on a fledgling writer he took pity on in...

We all remember our first time. Mine was in 10th grade AP English in 1963. I loved reading, which was probably why I was in AP in the first place, but the stuff Mrs. Peters was making us read -- Silas Marner, Great Expectations, The Scarlet Letter -- was brutal....

When I met David Abrams at an Iraq War Symposium at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh last fall, the two of us really didn't bond as we should have. That's too bad because the connections we share with our respective wars, our similar roles, and our resultant writing are...

I'm not sure why I never watched China Beach when it aired from 1988-1991, but I didn't. I was pretty busy with work and my kids back then and was extremely turned off by everything Hollywood and TV had done to negatively stereotype U.S. Vietnam vets. So, I...

They wrote haikus about sand and showers and rape. They crafted dialogue replete with four-letter words, gallows humor and lingering questions. They talked passionately about online journaling and blogging and having their voices heard. They worked hard trying to find just the right words to describe a desert, a sunrise,...

My mother, Lucy (Lucia) Basile Bradley, celebrated her 94th birthday this week in fine fashion -- with family, friends, food, card games (pinochle is her favorite) and presents. She likes to get presents. This year's bounty included a cake and flowers...

"Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be break-through.
- R.D. Laing, The Politics of Experience and the Bird of Paradise

If you're not a basketball fan and could care less about collegiate athletics and are sick and tried of people chirping about March Madness then...

I'm having a hard time controlling my anger right now, but it must pale in comparison to the outrage that the families and loved ones of the 22,000 Americans who lost their lives during the Nixon administration's treacherous conduct of the U.S. war in Vietnam from 1968-73 must be experiencing....

Bobby Rogers of the Miracles died recently at the age of 73. "Another soldier in my life has fallen," Smokey Robinson said in a statement to CNN. "Bobby Rogers was my brother and a really good friend. He and I were born on the exact same day in the same...

After the Republican filibuster ended last week, Chuck Hagel was finally confirmed as the next U.S. secretary of defense, taking his place alongside another of my Vietnam veteran peers, John Kerry, who was recently named secretary of state. Now, almost exactly 40 years after the signing of the Paris Peace...

I've been a Vietnam veteran for 42 years. During that time, I've taught and written and thought about the war and its aftermath just about daily. I'm the author of one book about Vietnam -- and co-author of a soon-to-be-published other.

So, you'd think I've heard it...

(NOTE: My brother Ron turns 70 this week, and I'm reminded of his remarkable 16th birthday back in Philadelphia many years ago).

Being 16 years old in Philadelphia in the late 1950s had to be one of the coolest things ever, one of those generational defining moments that separate some...

Forty five years ago this week, a record was released that would become the first posthumous number-one single in American recording history, sell more than four million copies, and receive more than eight million airplays. I'm speaking of course of Otis Redding's only number one-single on...

I always hesitate before I push the "submit grades" button at the end of a semester of teaching. Part of that has to do with the notion of grades and grading, some has to do with my anticipation of the flurry of emails I'll receive in a manner of minutes...

As a 1950s kid growing up in inner-city Philadelphia, my rainy day babysitters were the Ambassador and Sherwood "theaters" where our beleaguered parents sent hordes of us to watch 5 and 10-cent double features. Every now and then they'd show a classic like High Noon or The African Queen, but...

Jimi Hendrix, born Johnny Allen Hendrix on this day (November 27) in 1942 would have turned 70 years old this week! That thought alone boggles the mind, because for those of us who came of age with him and his music, Jimi will forever be in his 20's -- hot,...

My earliest memories of Veterans Day are filled with images of my dad telling me that "on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918, the year before I was born, World War I ended."

When my father spoke those words -- as he did...

Fingers slide along the piano as a smoky sax weaves its way around the room, searching for the rhythm, the melody. A soft drum and a quiet bass are trying to catch up, too, and then it's too late and the music stops and the room is cleared and we'll...

NOTE from the teacher: Our UW-Madison students responded very positively to Tim O'Brien's award-winning "non-fiction novel" The Things They Carried. One freshman in particular, Irene Burski of Bethesda, Maryland, used an excerpt from O'Brien's book as an opportunity to articulate her views on all that's just and unjust about the...