Combat and Campus: Writing Through War
REVIEWS

Elm Grove Press, Old Mystic, Connecticut, 2021 

“Sgt. Peter Langlois and his sister, Annette Langlois Grunseth, reveal a priceless treasure in these pages. There is no better way to understand how the Vietnam War impacted an entire generation than to read these eloquent letters and poems. As witnesses to the effects of war at home, on a U.S. college campus, and in Vietnam, in the heat of combat, they lead us to understand how the war continues to reverberate in our hearts and lives.” -- Ruth W. Crocker, author of Those Who Remain: Remembrance and Reunion After War

 Combat and Campus: Writing Through War fulfills the promise Annette Langlois Grunseth made to her mother, that she will find a way to publish the letters her brother Peter wrote home from Vietnam. Peter Langlois had been drafted fresh out of college and soon deployed to an area of fierce fighting near the Cambodian border. He wrote war-seared letters with the precision of the journalist he studied to be: rice paddy, rubber plantation, ambush, bomb and artillery craters, medevacs. Bodies. Body parts. Peter’s letters and Grunseth’s tough-minded and tender poems tell the story of multiple levels of courage, urging us, hope against hope, never to go again to war. – Margaret Rozga, author of Holding My Selves Together, 2019-2020 Wisconsin Poet Laureate

 Poet Annette Langlois Grunseth has gathered her brother's eyewitness letters from the Vietnam War some fifty years ago, bringing us home-ground truth about those divisive times. Sgt. Peter R. Langlois's letters eloquently spell out war's tedium and horror. In her own poems thinking back, his sister's poems count the cost, then and on return to civilian life. It’s a riveting, heart-breaking, read, and I couldn’t put it down. -- Robin Chapman, poet, author of The Only Home We Know (Tebot Bach).

 Losing a brother or sister is a special brand of heartache, but Annette Grunseth has turned that heartache into a triumphant book. The interplay of her poetry and her brother's letters home as a soldier in Vietnam in Combat and Campus: Writing Through War is intimate, nuanced and compelling. It doesn't hurt that both sister and brother can write their marled socks off. Sgt. Peter Langlois' insights from the front lines are a revelation to me, and although I was privileged to read many of Annette's poems in draft, reading her poems of childhood, the turbulent 60's, and the aftermath of war in a context of love and anxiety for her brother adds poignant dimension. Annie Lamott has famously said, "We forget so much." Yet Annette's book is not only a fully realized tribute to her brother, it is an urgent reminder of events we shouldn't neglect, so that they can continue to inform our future. -- Tori Grant Welhouse, poet, author of prize-winning YA novel, The Fergus

 Combat and Campus: Writing Through War is a moving, respectful, and honest book that accurately recalls the days of conflict in Vietnam and at home. This book has stayed with me, reawakening memories for those of us who lived through the war. For newer generations, this book should be required reading in classrooms across the country. There is nothing I know like this; it is beautifully balanced between war and home, combat and campus, prose and poetry. It is an unputdownable account of our nation’s trauma, encapsulated in the experience of one family.  – Judith Heide Gilliland, author of The Day of Ahmed’s Secret and Strange Birds

 There is a powerful, historically accurate story in this book that Annette Langlois Grunseth has put together from her own poetry and letters from her brother’s Vietnam experience. The story starts in childhood, moves on to her brother’s experiences in boot camp, moves to harrowing, graphic experiences in some of the most difficult fighting in Vietnam, and ends in the denouement of poetry and loss. Peter Langlois did not die in Vietnam, but the loss from the war, documented in the letters he wrote, haunted his life and still haunts his family’s life all these years later. History is important because it defines who we have been as we evolve into who we are and will be. Poetry is important because it explores the spiritual substance of who we have been, who we are and will be. This book acts as both primary source history and a poetic exploration of what Vietnam meant to one family and the nation both yesterday and on into the contemporary world. It is an important book that helps define some of the whirlpools that American society has inherited from the past. – Thomas Davis, novelist, historian, poet, author of In the Unsettled Homeland of Dreams, (All Things Matter Press), winner of the Edna Ferber Fiction Award of 2019.

 I am honored to learn the true story of Sgt. Peter Langlois. These personal letters from Vietnam to his family are immediate and real. Tears well up. I feel the deep fear, anger, and pain Peter felt. This book captures one soldier’s willingness to serve, and the gripping heartache and loss experienced by an American family. I echo the words in his sister’s poem, the words Peter didn’t hear back then, "Welcome Home, Brother!”    Jim Grunseth, 1974 West Point Graduate