Vietnam Vets Research Articles

Vietnam Vet Noir After 9/11: Quarry, Dog Soldiers, and the Anti-Ethical Appeal of a Contemporary Subgenre

Vietnam Vet Noir After 9/11: Quarry, Dog Soldiers, and the Anti-Ethical Appeal of a Contemporary Subgenre

The Mind Reader

Are weak people more prone to follow an authoritarian? In this work of philosophical short fiction, the narrator tells the story of a man he knew in the 1970’s. In this remembered story, the narrator is a psychology student learning about the “F Test,” a test that supposedly allows you to gauge your fascist tendencies. He friend, a Vietnam Vet, disagrees with the simplicity of the test. To prove his point the friend talks to, and easily manipulates, a bohemian woman in the bar to change her life (for the better). The narrator watches and does nothing, but is horrified by how easily this happens. The incident ends their friendship.

Agent Orange Associated with Higher Risk for Dementia in Study of Vietnam Vets

Agent Orange Associated with Higher Risk for Dementia in Study of Vietnam Vets

Rambo in the dead lands: on cinema, war and climate

In war-weary Israel, where military checkpoints dot the country and gun-toting soldiers are everywhere, visitors cannot help but be apprehensive. The soaring temperatures and isolation of the country’s rugged landscape fit the mood of lonely, dispirited Vietnam vet John Rambo.1 This extract from a 1987 Los Angeles Times article implies that war and climate in Israel combine to create a perfect film set for Rambo III (Peter MacDonald, 1988). Produced by TriStar on the eve of the Soviet Union’s collapse, Rambo III delivered an action-packed Cold War story about US military aid being provided to the Afghan mujahideen by the CIA. Israel was perceived to be a suitable stand-in for Afghanistan, where John Rambo (Sylvester Stallone) fought alongside local guerrillas against Soviet troops. ‘Israel’, Stallone explained to a local reporter, ‘is a perfect replacement for Afghanistan. Not only is it bone-dry, but it’s also in war.’2 Rambo III is a by-product of the deepening relations between Hollywood and Israel during the 1980s, and just one of a handful of Hollywood films that were produced in the deserts of Israel at the time. With a third of its territory consisting of arid or semi-arid terrain, Israel’s climate could conveniently simulate the orientalized war zone,3 but the country held another advantage that made it a ‘natural’ substitute. Dozens of declassified documents found in the IDF (Israeli Military) Archive in Israel reveal lengthy bureaucratic exchanges between Hollywood executives and military officers, containing snappy pitches, character descriptions, artistic statements and, most importantly, evaluations of long lists of weapons and military facilities to be used as props in the manufacturing of cinematic spectacle. These include guns, tanks, jeeps, built structures, soldiers, aeroplanes, helicopters and, above all, swathes of desert land, regularly deployed by the IDF for training purposes, that were to be re-appropriated as lucrative film locations. With the Nevada and Mojave deserts becoming increasingly costly as locations, the documents show Hollywood entrepreneurs venturing further to identify suitable replacements for the numerous film productions that dramatized the US intervention into Middle Eastern territories.4 Titles such as Delta Force (Mehamen Golan, 1986), Riding the Edge (James Fargo, 1989), Iron Eagle (Sidney J. Furie, 1986), Sahara (Andrew McLaglen, 1983) and Rambo III all feature combat scenarios, with the desert often standing in for enemy terrain. The documents reveal how the Israeli military was a particularly valuable co-producer of cinema, and attest to the material basis that enabled such collaborations to prosper. Expansive territories in the Negev held by the IDF facilitated the most desirable of commodities: the desert itself.

The Thin White Line: Veterans and the White Racial Politics of Creative Writing

Abstract This essay considers how the creative writing workshop transformed the white Vietnam vet into a minority writer. The MFA system, which organized the group-based politics of post–civil rights American literature, originated as a space geared toward white combat veterans. Some of the first graduate programs in creative writing were founded in the years after World War II, and their classes were dominated by white vets attending college on the GI Bill. The vets received the now-clichéd advice to write what they know, to turn their war experiences into war stories. The next wave of program building followed the passage of the Higher Education Act of 1965 and the Vietnam Veterans’ Readjustment Benefits Act of 1966, which brought Vietnam vets into a changing workshop, where students still learned to write what they know but also, as pre–civil rights racial liberalism turned to post–civil rights liberal multiculturalism, write who they are. The trauma of combat allowed white men to situate themselves within late twentieth-century literary culture by writing not as white men but as “veteran-Americans.” Veteran-American literature set white men within the pluralist institution but without forfeiting the cultural center, or the front seat in the classroom.

We gotta get out of this place: the soundtrack of the Vietnam War

For a Kentucky rifleman who spent his tour trudging through Vietnam's Central Highlands, it was Nancy Sinatra's These Boots Are Made for Walkin'. For a tunnel rat who blew smoke into the Viet Cong's underground tunnels, it was Jimi Hendrix's Purple Haze. For a black marine distraught over the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., it was Aretha Franklin's Chain of Fools. And for countless other Vietnam vets, it was I Feel Like I'm Fixin' to Die, Who'll Stop the Rain, or the song that gives this book its title. In We Gotta Get Out of This Place, Doug Bradley and Craig Werner place popular music at the heart of the American experience in Vietnam. They explore how and why U.S. troops turned to music as a way of connecting to each other and the World back home and of coping with the complexities of the war they had been sent to fight. They also demonstrate that music was important for every group of Vietnam veterans -- black and white, Latino and Native American, men and women, officers and grunts -- whose personal reflections drive the book's narrative. Many of the voices are those of ordinary soldiers, airmen, seamen, and marines. But there are also solo pieces by veterans whose writings have shaped our understanding of the war -- Karl Marlantes, Alfredo Vea, Yusef Komunyakaa, Bill Ehrhart, Arthur Flowers -- as well as songwriters and performers whose music influenced soldiers' lives, including Eric Burdon, James Brown, Bruce Springsteen, Country Joe McDonald, and John Fogerty. Together their testimony taps into memories -- individual and cultural -- that capture a central if often overlooked component of the American war in Vietnam.

Three Patients

At 0622, I walked into the resident room. I pulled on my scrubs and clipped my stethoscope, cell phone, and trauma shears to my waist. A patient had joked I looked like a gunslinger from an old western. I felt more like Don Quixote, with my makeshift strapped on armor, trying to do good against all odds. I walked into my shift at 0645, into the busy urban emergency department I called home. The night intern signed out to me. The sign-out included the usual scattering of the very sick and the very intoxicated; everyone else had gone home before dawn broke. I walked up to see a new patient that EMS had just rolled in, an elderly Vietnam vet who'd fallen and couldn't get up. He was terrified he'd broken his back. I reassured him and his wife as best I could without lying to him. Leaving, I got a call from the nurse of one of my patients. “The woman in 19 wanted to leave, is at triage.” Stale alcohol wafted through the air. As I tried to make sure she was sober, she grew irate. When I asked her to walk, she huffed and took two steps to me with her middle finger raised, stopping right before she slammed into me. I went to print her discharge to a commentary telling me where I could put it. I've been a resident in emergency medicine for two months now, but I've already begun to find those encounters blasé. As I bade her good health and walked back, the veteran called me over. He and his wife seemed terrified so I reassured them and explained what to expect as the day went on. I walked over to go see my new patient and I got a call, “Bed 14 wants to talk to you.” As I approached, I saw the half-naked, well-built, angry-looking fellow I'd been signed out and had a sinking feeling. He cursed at me with a fluency I've grown to expect, with his sweet, old mother sitting next to him holding his dirty shoes and clothes on her lap. “Let me go!” he spat, as I kept my distance, a muscular technician at my side. As I tried to examine him, his anger grew. He ripped off his C-collar in one mighty swipe and his blood pressure cuff in another. As he was rising from bed, security officers materialized, as if beamed down from Star Trek. Under their gentle, watchful gaze, I finished examining him and, finding him sober, discharged him. As my day progressed, I saw a handful more patients, dispositioning them with the eagerness and ineptitude of an August intern. The veteran ended up having a compression fracture, and as I helped put him in his back brace, he thanked me effusively. As I said goodbye, he looked me in the eye and said, “I don't know how you do it. I heard that woman curse at you, and I saw how badly that kid wanted to rip your head off. How do you do it? All this pain and suffering day in and day out would destroy me…” I smiled, shrugged my shoulders, and said “It comes with the job.” As I walked away I was forced to confront my flippant answer. I'm an intern, two months into residency and already I've lost a handful of patients. I see terrible violence every day and as I dip into and out of people's lives I feel a faint echo of their misery. To survive as I tilt my lance at windmills, I wear a coat of emotional armor that allows me to take the hits, and keep working. My armor is adaptive: titanium when I see angry, intoxicated patients and cotton when I see scared sick people. Then I sign out, walk out of the emergency department's bright neon lights, and try to leave it all behind me. As I get home, to a loving significant other and puppy, I take a deep breath as I walk in the front door, take off the armor, piling it carefully by the door. After all, I work again tomorrow.

The Last True Love Story by Brendan Kiely

Reviewed by: The Last True Love Story by Brendan Kiely Karen Coats Kiely, Brendan The Last True Love Story. McElderry, 2016 [288p] Trade ed. ISBN 978-1-4814-2988-7 $17.99 E-book ed. ISBN 978-1-4814-2990-0 $10.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 9-12 Hendrix wants to express his love and gratitude for his grandfather, Gpa, a Vietnam vet who’s now battling Alzheimer’s, before it’s too late. He’s also fascinated by bold Corrina, who was adopted from Guatemala by well-meaning hippies and who resents the way they treat her like a psychological specimen rather than a daughter. Since she’s seeking escape, she’s game when Hendrix proposes she join him and Gpa on a road trip from their home in California to Ithaca, New York, the place where Gpa grew up, married, and buried the love of his life. It’s no accident that they are heading toward a place called Ithaca, or that one of their stops involves a concert by a band called Father Lotus; the subtle allusions and themes are more keyed to Cavafy’s poem “Ithaka” than Homer’s Odyssey, though, as the point here is the knowledge gained on the journey rather than the destination, which they never reach. Hendrix’s thoughtful narration functions as a poetic, reflective offset for the restless anger and teen angst he demonstrates in his behavior—anger toward Gpa’s illness, the secrets his mother and Gpa have kept from him about his dad, and his own insecurities. The latter are challenged and to a large degree assuaged by Corrina as the two become first friends and then lovers, but the real love story here is between the teens and Gpa, as both Hendrix and Corrina learn how to give Gpa the care he needs while learning from his experiences of love, war, regret, and forgiveness. Readers who appreciate literary road trips with Vietnam-era tunes on their playlists will enjoy this. Copyright © 2016 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

The Man Who Loved Birds by Fenton Johnson

Reviewed by: The Man Who Loved Birds by Fenton Johnson Jayne Moore Waldrop (bio) Fenton Johnson. The Man Who Loved Birds. Lexington, Ky.: University Press of Kentucky, 2016. 318 pages. Hardcover. $24.95. In The Man Who Loved Birds, Fenton Johnson returns to his native landscape in the Kentucky Knobs to revisit themes he has explored in past works—love, the law and the lawless, spirituality, solitude, nature. The novel is like a homecoming on many levels. The book is a new release by the University Press of Kentucky, part of its Kentucky Voices series that began a decade ago as a collection showcasing the best of the commonwealth’s literary traditions, including the works of Robert Penn Warren, George Ella Lyon, Frank X Walker and a handful of [End Page 113] other acclaimed writers. Johnson’s earlier novels, Crossing the River and Scissors, Paper, Rock have been reissued simultaneously as part of the series. The Man Who Loved Birds is set in the 1980s, a period when the region around Nelson, Marion and Washington counties became the hub of the largest domestic marijuana-growing organization in the United States. The area received national attention when federal and state drug enforcement officers seized 182 tons of marijuana in an extensive sting operation in multiple states. In headlines and in legend, the homegrown marijuana cartel became known as the Cornbread Mafia. The bust sent many Kentuckians to prison to serve long, mandatory sentences under laws enacted during the Reagan administration’s war on drugs. The novel includes a verbatim reproduction of a 1989 press release by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Louisville when sixty-eight people faced federal and state drug charges. Johnson’s research into the facts of the case began more than two decades ago when he wrote a feature-length article titled “High in the Hollows” for the New York Times Magazine, but inspiration for The Man Who Loved Birds began even earlier in Johnson’s life. In 1971, he was a teenager in Nelson County, ready to head to California to attend Stanford University. A Marion County man known for growing pot and eluding conviction was killed in a suspicious shootout with Kentucky State Police. About the same time, a new doctor from Pakistan moved to Johnson’s hometown. She was a Muslim woman who became the first doctor in years to practice medicine in the predominantly Roman Catholic community. The two events loomed large in Johnson’s memory for forty years before he started writing the novel. Three main characters form the heart of the story as they configure themselves into an unlikely triangle. Brother [End Page 114] Flavian is a Trappist monk who has begun to doubt his vows and ventures into the world beyond his central Kentucky monastery whenever he can. His character hooks the reader from the opening sentence: Brother Flavian was not entirely certain what brought him, a Trappist monk soon to celebrate his seventeenth year in the monastery, to be standing in the Miracle Inn with a draft beer in one hand and a pool cue in the other. Dr. Meena Chatterjee is a Bengali-born physician who has been recruited to the area to set up a rural medical practice in a repurposed gas station. She is a skilled doctor but hesitates to take action that might jeopardize her immigration status. Johnny Faye is a pot-growing Vietnam vet who uses outlying monastery land to cultivate his crop. He can’t read and lives outside the law; he’s also a storyteller, a bird lover, and the person that teaches lessons in transformational love to both Flavian and Meena. The three share another bond through their connection to war: Flavian entered the monastery as a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War; Johnny’s military service shifted his world view and introduced him to marijuana; Meena fled India after the war for Bangladesh liberation. Each leads a solitary existence, outsiders in their communities. Johnson is a masterful writer about the natural world. His descriptions of the central Kentucky landscape are lush and recognizable. The woods, creeks, rocky soil, birds and snakes—particularly the snakes—come alive for the reader...

The Prestige of Violence: American Fiction, 1962–2007 by Sally Bachner, Roth and Trauma: The Problem of History in the Later Works (1995–2010) by Aimee Pozorski

<i>The Prestige of Violence: American Fiction, 1962–2007</i> by Sally Bachner, <i>Roth and Trauma: The Problem of History in the Later Works (1995–2010)</i> by Aimee Pozorski

Dogs of War by Sheila Keenan (review)

Reviewed by: Dogs of War by Sheila Keenan Deborah Stevenson Keenan, Sheila. Dogs of War; illus. by Nathan Fox. Scholastic, 2013. 197p ISBN 978-0-545-12887-2 $22.99 R* Gr. 5-9 The title may prioritize dogs, but these three historical fiction stories in this graphic novel actually focus more strongly on the men who served with those dogs in three different wars. In “Boots,” sixteen-year-old Marcellinus McDonald is a doctor’s assistant on the Western Front in 1914, and Boots is his beloved “mercy dog,” who finds the wounded in No Man’s Land. “Loki” is a sled dog in a rescue unit stationed in 1942 Greenland, where his master relies on him in a solo encounter with some reconnoitering Nazis. The final story, “Sheba,” follows young Henry in 1968 North Carolina as his struggles with his obstreperous beagle pup bring him friendship with a recently returned Vietnam vet haunted by his experience on patrol with his German shepherd, Sheba. Keenan creates vivid voices for her [End Page 219] characters, effectively tucking in exposition to convey information about everything from military objectives to daily life details in three very different situations. There’s action aplenty, but the rhythms and trajectories vary effectively: “Boots” is a classic story of the Christmas Truce; “Loki” is an adventure tale of intelligence and hand-to-hand combat; “Sheba,” which could stand alone as a book in its own right, is a poignant tale of male bonding between a young fatherless African-American boy and a black soldier overwhelmed by his experiences. Though the chaos of the action scenes can make them difficult to read, the art is atmospheric and effective, blending cinematic heroism, especially in the portraits of the dogs, with often daunting realism. Diehard warmongers, dog fans, and graphic-novel readers will all find something new here, and this will be an easy booktalk to readers reluctant and otherwise. Copyright © 2013 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Disability Memoirs in the Academic World:

This article aims to examine how academic memoirs by disabled women exert a specific cultural mediation in contemporary society’s perception of disability. Mary Felstiner’s Out of Joint (2007) and Simi Linton’s My Body Politic (2006) are two examples of what G. Thomas Couser has called the “new disability memoir,” as they are so highly self-aware about the issues involved in representation and disability (2009, 164). Moreover, inasmuch these texts focus to a significant degree on the narrator’s professional life, I would like to analyze them also as academic memoirs; in both, we invariably find the academic background as the platform from which they are able to build up a renewed identity. As their academic careers unfold (Linton’s in psychology and Felstiner’s in history), these women try to understand the deep changes their lives and bodies undergo with a severe impairment. In this context, I will look at the identity strategies these authors consciously use in order to become affirmative models of disability, showing the “damaging effects not of disease or impairment but, rather, of the cultural mythologies that interpret those conditions in reductive or disparaging ways” (Mintz 2005, 1). Mary Felstiner and Simi Linton live quite parallel lives. Both have Jewish family backgrounds, both are happily married, both are feminists, and both will eventually become university professors. Before all that, they also share a generational time frame. They were born in the 1940s, and it is around 1970 (Felstiner in 1969 and Linton in 1971) when, still in their twenties, they meet

Government Programs Helping to Identify More PTSD Sufferers

Government Programs Helping to Identify More PTSD Sufferers

Dogtag Summer (review)

Reviewed by: Dogtag Summer Deborah Stevenson, Editor Partridge, Elizabeth. Dogtag Summer. Bloomsbury, 2011. [240p]. ISBN 978-1-59990-183-1 $16.99 Reviewed from galleys Ad Gr. 6–9. It’s the summer of 1980, and Tracy, who has just finished seventh grade, is initially expecting a regular vacation where she goofs around with her best friend, Stargazer. One small moment, however, brings Tracy sharp and painful memories of her life in Vietnam before she left to be adopted in America five years ago, and she begins to question her family’s silence about her past. It’s not just her past that’s a mystery, though; her adoptive father is a Vietnam vet who’s clearly still troubled by his experience there, and because he shuts Tracy down whenever she asks questions, she decides to investigate his Vietnam experience as well—and finds a startling connection to hers. Tracy’s backstory is a dramatic one, and her residual anxiety is understandable; the flashbacks to her life in Vietnam give vivid glimpses of a war-gripped country where she, as a half-American child, put her family at risk just by existing. That story’s sufficiently interesting that it’s frustrating when the book focuses so much on her father’s experience instead and often seems more concerned with his adjustment than hers. Additionally, the secret about her father’s (and her) past requires several ostensibly sympathetic people to have behaved unsympathetically and improbably and undercuts the realism with soap-operatic leaps of logic. The subject is still a poignant one, though, and those who wanted more after Burg’s All the Broken Pieces(BCCB 5/09) may wish to pursue the topic here. An appendix offers a Q&A about the Vietnam War. Copyright © 2011 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Cinder

Cinder Tiffany Austin (bio) A brush of hair gathered around the waist of a father, he asks somebody’s mother if she could watch his child for a while. Partly burned and to burn no more. A Vietnam vet once told me better to be raped and survive than to be killed, better to live with syphilis amongst wild horses, it’s only flesh, slant and crude. I want to explain on a high bed with a hard mattress that first loves contaminate, and little girls’ holes in any country can be rendered powerless. But body has lost hope, become borrowed sugar, taste buds. The soldiers are closer now. Closer to our village. Closer to our home. Horses I’ve never seen before are trampling across the water. There is not enough water to stop them. They are not wild enough to stop at water. Becoming a woman is wearable. I hear the water and the breathing of the horses’ hooves in between. Me and my country are scooped up flesh. A shoe stretched near a mother’s knees, she tells her daughter to smell like forgiveness always, but don’t forgive. Swallow your rottenness, and make sure you have clean underwear. [End Page 711] Tiffany Austin Tiffany Austin is a candidate for the PhD degree in English at St. Louis University. She has published in Obsidian III, Warpland, and Coloring Book: An Anthology of Poetry and Fiction by Multicultural Writers (2004). Copyright © 2011 The Johns Hopkins University Press

The Cold Dish , and: Death without Company , and: Kindness Goes Unpunished , and: Another Man’s Moccasins , and: The Dark Horse (review)

Reviewed by: The Cold Dish, and: Death without Company, and: Kindness Goes Unpunished, and: Another Man’s Moccasins, and: The Dark Horse Ann Ronald The Cold Dish. By Craig Johnson. New York: Penguin Books, 2005. 354 pages, $14.00. Death without Company. By Craig Johnson. New York: Penguin Books, 2006. 271 pages, $14.00. Kindness Goes Unpunished. By Craig Johnson. New York: Penguin Books, 2007. 288 pages, $14.00. Another Man’s Moccasins. By Craig Johnson. New York: Penguin Books, 2008. 290 pages, $14.00. The Dark Horse. By Craig Johnson. New York: Viking Penguin, 2009. 318 pages, $24.05. Usually a book-a-year output from either a writer of Westerns or a writer of detective stories would invite an unfortunate condemnation: formulaic genre writer. In the case of Craig Johnson, author of five recent Walt Longmire mysteries, that label would be wrong. Each of his novels is vigorously plotted, psychologically complex, and inherently thoughtful. While Johnson acknowledges a debt to James Crumley, he actually extends the range of the noir Western mystery far beyond his predecessor’s accomplishments. The settings, stories, and situations are shrewd, sophisticated, and smart. They tease the formula; they turn it upside down. The West itself is fully realized, a full-fledged rural Wyoming with its blizzards, its isolation, its tight-knit communities, its gossip, its distinctive inhabitants. Scenic descriptions resonate: “The clouds were dappled like the hindquarters of an Appaloosa colt, and the beauty kicked just as hard. The head wind rattled the bare limbs of the cottonwoods as the longer branches swayed, and the remnants of grass and sage shuddered close to the ground” (Cold Dish 334). The people resonate, too, their personalities distinct and their quirks quite charming. Each novel stars Sheriff Longmire, an aging Vietnam vet who, despite his easygoing manner and love of literature, always gets his man—usually in violent fashion. The posse ensemble includes Vic (his Philadelphia-trained deputy who finds herself in unfamiliar territory), Ruby (the shrewd dispatch voice of organizational competence), and Santiago “Sancho” Saizarbitoria (a Basque lawman who arrives on the scene in the second book and stays). Even more compelling is the sheriff’s best friend, Henry Standing Bear, a Cheyenne sidekick whose inherent wisdom and physical prowess rescue Longmire from some very tough spots. He may be a Tonto look-alike, but it’s often Standing Bear’s competence that steers the plots toward successful completion. [End Page 400] So Johnson gives his readers a heroic sheriff, an Indian sidekick, a faithful posse, and larger-than-life solutions to mystery and mayhem. Sounds like genre fiction. Right? Wrong. The isolated terrain and the distinctive characters and the random murders totally transcend easy labels. Several things carry the novels beyond the stereotypes. First is the sense of community. Each novel centers on a subset of communal interactions. In The Cold Dish, it’s the Cheyennes; in Death without Company, it’s the Basques; in Kindness Goes Unpunished, where Longmire and Standing Bear travel east, it’s Philadelphia’s Italian neighborhoods; in Another Man’s Moccasins, it’s the heritage of Vietnam; in The Dark Horse, it’s the cowboy and his horse. In each case, the micro-world is tightly wrought and convincingly portrayed. Only in Philadelphia does the sheriff seem out of his element. He belongs in the West, I think, because he’s the laconic western hero, although he’s a lawman with many more dimensions than a Gunsmoke or Hopalong Cassidy fan might imagine. Given his western-ness, then, the four novels set in Wyoming are more believable than the one set totally elsewhere. Ironically, though, to me the most compelling of Johnson’s Wyoming books is Another Man’s Moccasins, where intercut Vietnam scenes from the past drum a rhythmic counterpoint to the present-day plot. In any event, community is crucial. Another highlight of the novels, alongside those unique communal focal points, is a strong Native American component. Henry Standing Bear is nothing like a foil. Rather, he guides the narrative lines and instructs Longmire along the way. The sheriff reacts intuitively, often assimilating what appear to be Native reactions and Native responses to narrative surprises. It might...

Depression Risk Increases in Patients With Diabetes

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Professional NewsFull AccessDepression Risk Increases in Patients With DiabetesJoan Arehart-TreichelJoan Arehart-TreichelSearch for more papers by this authorPublished Online:15 Jan 2010https://doi.org/10.1176/pn.45.2.psychnews_45_2_010AbstractA large new study confirms what some others have found—that there is a link between depression and type 2 diabetes. Moreover, it has found an increased incidence of depression even in people who are unaware that they have type 2 diabetes.The study was headed by Catharine Gale, Ph.D., a principal research fellow in epidemiology at Southampton General Hospital in England. Results were published online November 6, 2009, in Biological Psychiatry.As part of the Vietnam Experience Study conducted by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control in the 1980s, some 4,300 Vietnam vets had their fasting blood glucose levels measured and were also assessed for major depression. The researchers were evaluating whether there was a link between having type 2 diabetes and major depression.Gale and her group found that men who were aware that they had type 2 diabetes were almost four times as likely to have major depression as were men who did not have diabetes. But even men who were unaware that they were diabetic were at twice the risk of having major depression as were men who did not have diabetes.This cross-sectional study does not shed light on how depression and type 2 diabetes are coupled, but there are various hypotheses. For example, if people know that they have type 2 diabetes and feel compelled to cope with it, that knowledge might depress them. Yet because depression was linked with type 2 diabetes even in men who were not aware that they had diabetes, it argues against this explanation, the researchers believe.In fact, longitudinal studies have suggested that depression may increase the risk of developing type 2 diabetes, Gale told Psychiatric News. If that is the case, then depression might do so by activating hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal hormones, since activation of these hormones is linked with both depression and development of type 2 diabetes.Meanwhile, the results from this study have implications for psychiatrists, Gale said. “Our results provide further confirmation that depression and type 2 diabetes commonly co-occur. Doctors caring for people with depression should perhaps be aware that they may be at particular risk of type 2 diabetes.”The study was funded by the United Kingdom Biotechnology Sciences Research Council, Wellcome Trust, and other sources.An abstract of “Fasting Glucose, Diagnosis of Type 2 Diabetes, and Depression: The Vietnam Experience Study,” can be accessed at <http://www.journals.elsevierhealth.com/periodicals/bps> by clicking on “Articles in Press.” ISSUES NewArchived

Natural acts: A sidelong view of science and nature

Lively writing about science and nature depends less on the offering of good answers, I think, than on the offering of good questions, said David Quammen in the original introduction to Acts. For more than two decades, he has stuck to that credo. In this updated version of curiosity leads him from New Mexico to Romania, from the Congo to the Amazon, asking questions about mosquitoes (what are their redeeming merits?), dinosaurs (how did they change the life of a dyslexic Vietnam vet?), and cloning (can it save endangered species?). This revised and expanded edition best-loved Natural columns, which first appeared in Outside magazine in the early 1980s, and includes recent pieces such as Planet of Weeds, an influential new Acts is an eye-opening journey that will please both Quammen fans and newcomers to his work.

On Collaborating: An Interview with José Cruz González

FALL 2009 159 On Collaborating: An Interview with José Cruz González Susan Vaneta Mason José Cruz González is a playwright, director, musician, lyricist, creator of the Hispanic Playwrights Project at South Coast Repertory Theatre in Costa Mesa, California, and Professor of Theatre Arts and Dance at California State University, Los Angeles. His parents and grandparents were farm workers and he grew up on California’s central coast. He went to college during the Mexican American Civil Rights movement where he was among the first generation of Chicano Studies students who defined and shaped Chicano theatre. González has a prolific career as a writer of youth and adult plays and has received numerous awards (Kennedy Center, NEA, TCG and others). During his development as an artist and throughout his professional career with commissions by numerous theatre companies, he has been committed to exploring diverse approaches to artistic collaboration. González’s latest play, Sunsets and Margaritas, was recently produced at the Denver Arts Center in Colorado. Susan Mason is González’s colleague at California State University, Los Angeles. She has collaborated with him on professional and academic projects. When and where did you first begin studying theatre? I did my undergraduate work at University of California San Diego in the late 1970s where I majored in U.S History/Chicano Studies and minored in Theatre. Why theatre? I knew I wanted to go to graduate school and thought theatre would help my communication skills. So I began by taking beginning, intermediate and then advanced acting. Eventually the teacher asked me to help coach ac- 160 LATIN AMERICAN THEATRE REVIEW tors. I was also tapping into the creativity in my childhood: painting, sketching, making things with my hands. How did theatre and Chicano Studies come together for you? Were you aware of Chicano theatre at that time? I first became aware of Chicano theatre by taking a class at UCSD from Jorge Huerta. We studied Teatro history and read plays. With that course I found my calling. Besides that, companies such as Teatro de la Esperanza toured to the university with bilingual productions. I also got to see the work of Carlos Morton who was an MFA student there. He had worked with the San Francisco Mime Troupe. Tony Curiel was a graduating senior who went on to Stanford and then El Teatro Campesino. Silvia Cortez, Olga Villanueva, and Goyo Flores, a Vietnam vet, were undergrads in the program. So I got involved with the teatro group Jorge created on campus. After UCSD I went to Arizona State University and worked on my MA in theatre. I poured over everything I could find on Latino theatre, the history of the movement, when, how, Nuyorican writing. I started a teatro there. We performed with local actors and created some of our own work. At this time my focus changed to directing. I directed The Hands of God by Carlos Solórzano that became my thesis project. I was also introduced to theatre for young audiences. At that time my overall goal was to work with El Teatro Campesino or Teatro de la Esperanza: to take my training and experience back to the theatre. So after ASU, I applied to the MFA program at UC Irvine for more training in directing. What kinds of directing opportunities did you have when you completed your professional training at Irvine? How did your employment at South Coast Repertory (SCR) come about? While I was at Irvine, I had a summer internship with El Teatro Campesino. I also directed a student production of a Mexican play, Los Fantoches (The Effigies), that we took to the Edinburgh Festival. At Irvine I also worked with EOP [Education Opportunity Program] that had participated in a project called Second Lives at South Coast Rep. Second Lives was about immigrants and refugees of Orange County. I met with the project director, Michael Bigelow Dixon who invited me to assist him at SCR. And that lead to full-time employment at SCR? I began reading plays in Literary at SCR while I was still a student at Irvine. And I directed a play, Terra Nova, in a black box theatre...

Making Things Present: Tim O’Brien’s Autobiographical Metafiction

Beginning with its front matter, Tim O'Brien's collection of interlinked short narratives The Things They Carried (1990) raises fundamental questions about the nature of truth _and narrative authority. Published as a of fiction, the book includes a fairly standard disclaimer that [e]xcept for a few details regarding the author's own life, all the incidents, names, and characters are imaginary. Yet the book is also lovingly dedi cated to the men of Alpha Company?a that elevates these imaginary characters to the level of real people worthy of a dedication. Such slippery negotiation of fact and fiction continues with the epigraph, taken from John Ransom's Andersonville Diary, which reads, [t]hose who have had any such experience as the author will see its truthfulness at once, and to all other readers it is commended as a of actual things by one who experienced them to the fullest. Thus even as the copyright page provides a legalistic disclaimer specifying that The Things They Carried is a work of imaginative literature rather than a historical document, the front matter encourages inexperienced readers to appreciate the text as a statement of actual things, as a work of truth. If the epigraph reads like an attempt to authorize the use of fiction in order to write history, O'Brien's narrator also makes liberal use of history (his story) to develop and organize the fiction. Indeed, despite the collection's self-consciously fictional status, O'Brien incorporates undeniably autobiographical elements, such as a char acter named Tim O'Brien who is a writer and a Vietnam vet, a writer, like O'Brien himself, who went to graduate school at Harvard and then published a novel entitled Going After Cacciato