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Veterans Book Group

A book discussion series for veterans led by Vietnam Veteran Wayne Karlin. Registration required; space is limited. For more information contact Kimberlé Fields at 301-863-8188 or kfields@stmalib.org.

This book discussion series is tailored for veterans and their families. Service members of all eras, their spouses, and adult children are welcome. Author and retired college professor Wayne Karlin will lead us through conversations about books written in very different styles but connected by themes of war, courage, love, honor, and trauma.

Meetings will be held at Lexington Park library on the first Saturday of the month from 2-4 p.m. Supplies are limited; participants may pick up a copy of the book one month before the meetings.

The Veterans Book Group is coordinated statewide by Maryland Humanities and is presented locally in partnership with St. Mary’s County Library. Veterans Book Group is supported this year by St. Mary’s County Library.

BOOK LIST

February 07 - With the Old Breed: at Peleliu and Okinawa by Eugene Sledge  

Based on notes Sledge secretly kept in a copy of the New Testament, With the Old Breed captures with utter simplicity and searing honesty the experience of a soldier in the fierce Pacific Theater. Here is what saved, threatened, and changed his life. Here, too, is the story of how he learned to hate and kill—and came to love—his fellow man.

“In all the literature on the Second World War, there is not a more honest, realistic or moving memoir than Eugene Sledge’s. This is the real deal, the real war: unvarnished, brutal, without a shred of sentimentality or false patriotism, a profound primer on what it actually was like to be in that war. It is a classic that will outlive all the armchair generals’ safe accounts of—not the ‘good war’—but the worst war ever.”—Ken Burns

March 07 - Seeking Quan Am: A Dual Memoir by Susan R. Dixon and Mark Smith

What happens when a two-tour Vietnam veteran tries to talk to an anti-war activist decades after the war has ended? Will buried memories, simmering resentment, and divisive stereotypes sabotage their effort? Has too much time passed?

Mark M. Smith chose to enlist in the Army after his high school graduation in 1966 and to serve in Vietnam as an infantryman with the First Air Cavalry. He wanted to experience war directly, to feel what it was like to come under fire—and he got his wish. His high school classmate

Susan R. Dixon had seen the physical effects of world wars, the Six Day War in Israel, and even the French Revolution during her travels in Europe and the Middle East. She also witnessed the emotional effects of the Civil War and world wars in generations of her own family. She opposed the war Mark chose to fight in.

When Mark and Susan reconnected in 2012, Mark needed an editor for the writing he had done immediately after the war. Susan had become interested in how the trauma of the Vietnam War had affected not just the veterans, but those who witnessed the war indirectly. Together they journeyed into memory and toward modern Vietnam, with no guarantees where that journey would take them.

April 04 - Street Without Joy: The French Debacle in Indochina by Bernard Fall 

First published in 1961 by Stackpole Books, Street without Joy is a classic of military history.

Journalist and scholar Bernard Fall vividly captured the sights, sounds, and smells of the brutal— and politically complicated—conflict between the French and the Communist-led Vietnamese nationalists in Indochina. The French fought to the bitter end, but even with the lethal advantages of a modern military, they could not stave off the Viet Minh insurgency of hit-and-run tactics, ambushes, booby traps, and nighttime raids. The final French defeat came at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, setting the stage for American involvement and a far bloodier chapter in Vietnam‘s history. Fall combined graphic reporting with deep scholarly knowledge of Vietnam and its colonial history in a book memorable in its descriptions of jungle fighting and insightful in its arguments.

After more than a half a century in print, Street without Joy remains required reading.

May 02 - An Artist's Legacy by Khanh Ha  

Amid the raging Indochina War war blossoms a love story when an artist/reporter meets a singer/performer who travels with an entertainment troupe to the valley of Dien Bien Phu for the climactic confrontation between the Viet Minh and the French Union. The lovers become separated after the victory of Đien Bien Phu when the artist is sent to South Viet Nam to fight the American Viet Nam War. They meet again 40 years later in that valley called Đien Bien Phu. His solitary soul is reunited with his truelove. It is a simple love story that transcends cultural barriers.

An Artist's Legacy is a lush, evocative, epic journey, from a love story amid the horror of war to the muted anguish of death and destruction. It carries the quality of Tree of Smoke in a foreign historical setting and an epic sense of Love in the Time of Cholera.

June 06 - Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner's Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause by Ty Seidule

Ty Seidule grew up revering Robert E. Lee. From his southern childhood to his service in the U.S. Army, every part of his life reinforced the Lost Cause myth: that Lee was the greatest man who ever lived, and that the Confederates were underdogs who lost the Civil War with honor. Now, as a retired brigadier general and Professor Emeritus of History at West Point, his view has radically changed. From a soldier, a scholar, and a southerner, Ty Seidule believes that American history demands a reckoning.

In a unique blend of history and reflection, Seidule deconstructs the truth about the Confederacy—that its undisputed primary goal was the subjugation and enslavement of Black Americans—and directly challenges the idea of honoring those who labored to preserve that system and committed treason in their failed attempt to achieve it.

Part history lecture, part meditation on the Civil War and its fallout, and part memoir, Robert E. Lee and Me challenges the deeply-held legends and myths of the Confederacy—and provides a surprising interpretation of essential truths that our country still has a difficult time articulating and accepting.

Photo by Ron Carver

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