Iraq & Vietnam War Stories

    Elise Forbes Tripp has written a most important book which relies on the voices of Iraq veterans to tell the story of the war.  SURVIVING IRAQ is the result of Tripp’s decision to get out of the way of the vets to whom she spoke and to “let the narratives be the entire point.”  I felt an immediate connection to this approach since it is precisely the one that I have taken with CALLED TO SERVE and from the excerpts that I have read in today’s DAILY HAMPSHIRE GAZETTE, she made a very wise decision not to make use of her training as an analyst of history and policy, but simply let her subjects speak to her.  Ms. Tripp describes in the article the pressure she experienced to “consider weaving the veterans’ stories into her own narrative, rather than letting their voices stand alone.”  She evidently promised all the veterans who agreed to talk that their stories would be included in the book.  The excerpts I am about to provide access to are very powerful and hopefully the book will find an audience despite the fact that, “oral histories are a hard sell,” something else with which I am familiar from my experience thus far with trying to get CALLED TO SERVE out…

Here’s the website for the article and book excerpts:

http://www.dailyhampshiregazette.com/cspstory.cfm?id_no=66604&vkey=19346846878186822b79247e12537fdc167cf9cb-61

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This entry was posted on Saturday, November 10th, 2007 at 5:37 pm and is filed under Books, Vietnam and Iraq. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.