Combat and Campus - Review by Author Kathryn Gahl
“Love is all you need,” sang the Beatles, a song playing while hate raged in Viet Nam. Fifty years later, this paradox provides the backdrop to Combat and Campus, a heart-thumping, gut-wrenching, mind-boggling read of letters home from Peter, a college graduate, describing one scene after another—and for what: “an unwinnable war,” he writes, a fact he realized too late while his sister Annette worried her way to freshman classes at UW-Madison through (as she writes, later) “protests and police . . . wondering where my brother and his friends have gone.”
Peter was drafted. He was trapped. Nothing made sense to him; he had no dominion over his hours, for he was owned, government-issue, a prisoner of the state of chaos, enduring nightmares. A man crawls on the ground, looking for his missing hand. Another man is still conscious when a medic begins a leg amputation to save his life.
It took time for Annette to glean the ineffable, then pair his agony with her poetry, as in “Cheerleaders at Yell Like Hell pep rally for homecoming could not compete with Hell No! We Won’t Go.”
“Death is so quick in Viet Nam,” wrote Peter, “there’s no way to prepare for it.” Decades later, Peter dies and Annette notes “buried anger, your knotted silence, and those cancer cells, burning bright orange.” These sibling insights should be required reading for “the major powers in this world . . . to realize the virtue of love and compassion,” as Peter wrote. That compassion trudges on when Annette writes, “Coma is the comma before crossing over, a sad parting by those of us left behind.”
Left behind is the quandary of global citizens getting along, a quandary that was haunting then, and worse now.
-Kathryn Gahl July 25, 2021