Review by Author Rod Vick
Benjamin Franklin wrote, “There was never a good war, or a bad peace.” While some who have been swept up in the romantic nationalism that has always accompanied our country’s armed conflicts might take offense to Franklin’s words, many who have experienced war firsthand embrace a grim understanding of war’s horrors. Author Annette Grunseth’s book, Combat and Campus: Writing through War, lends her elegant and earnest voice to provide context to the powerful letters from Vietnam written by her brother, Peter Langlois, who was deployed in 1968 and 1969—letters that underscore the boredom, injustice, fear, grief, homesickness, and raw hopelessness that are inevitable byproducts of sending young men to war.
The book has been a long-time project of Grunseth’s, who inherited her brother’s letters following his death from Agent Orange-related cancer at the age of 59. Langlois wrote long letters home to his parents, his sister, even to neighbors, forging a tenuous lifeline with the world he missed. As for Vietnam, Langlois wrote, “Every day we keep adding sandbags to our bunkers in anticipation of a mortar attack on the battalion logger site. Everyone is tense and dog tired. The sun burns daily and torrents of rain make the landscape muddier every night. This is Vietnam. A muddy, stinking hell.”
The first two-thirds of the book is dominated by Langlois’ letters, many of them printed in their entirety, their details gripping and impressive. Grunseth often provides context or a poem she has penned to augment the selection. While Langlois gives a thorough picture—the incompetence of superiors, the battles with the elements, the constant fear—nothing is more heartbreaking than his description of losses suffered in battle. “Yesterday was by far the worst day of my life,” Langlois wrote in October of 1968, after many of his buddies were horribly injured or killed when the armored vehicle in front of him hit a mine. Langlois attempted to help extract the driver, whose leg was pinned inside the twisted wreckage of the vehicle. “We tried without success to free his hooked leg by reaching up through the hole in the bottom of the hatch. The leg felt like warm applesauce but couldn’t be touched without him yelling all the louder.”
And, as is often the case, the war was not over when Langlois returned home. Grunseth wrote:
Where was my welcome
when I came home?
He raged about being
spat upon, taunted,
when protesters shouted
How Could you go to war?
How many did you kill?
Nothing was left unsaid.
Nothing could be undone.
Grunseth’s poetry underscores every emotional high and low, framing Langlois’ letters brilliantly. Grunseth wrote that as profound as his Vietnam experience had been, she doubted that her brother had ever reread the many letters he had sent home, which his parents kept in their safety deposit box. Even his wife and children knew little about them.
Thankfully, his sister has resurrected them, giving us a poignant, powerful look at Vietnam from a soldier’s perspective. “It is time to give voice to his story,” wrote Grunseth.
True words.
Combat and Campus: Writing through War is available from www.annettegrunseth.com www.elmgrove press.org and Amazon.
by Rod Vick, award-winning author whose twenty books include Kaylee's Choice, the first of a seven-book series following the coming-of-age adventures of a young Celtic dancer. His books also include, sci-fi, mystery, and historical non-fiction.
6/17/2021