Soldier S Heart

Elizabeth D. Samet and her students learned to romanticize the army "from the stories of their fathers and from the movies." For Samet, it was the old World War II movies she used to watch on TV, while her students grew up on Braveheart and Saving Private Ryan. Unlike their teacher, however, these students, cadets at the United States Military Academy at West Point, have decided to turn make-believe into real life. West Point is a world away from Yale, where Samet attended graduate school and where nothing sufficiently prepared her for teaching literature to young men and women who were training to fight a war. Intimate and poignant, Soldier's Heart chronicles the various tensions inherent in that life as well as the ways in which war has transformed Samet's relationship to literature. Fighting in Iraq, Samet's former students share what books and movies mean to them—the poetry of Wallace Stevens, the fiction of Virginia Woolf and J. M. Coetzee, the epics of Homer, or the films of James Cagney. Their letters in turn prompt Samet to wonder exactly what she owes to cadets in the classroom. Samet arrived at West Point before September 11, 2001, and has seen the academy change dramatically. In Soldier's Heart, she reads this transformation through her own experiences and those of her students. Forcefully examining what it means to be a civilian teaching literature at a military academy, Samet also considers the role of women in the army, the dangerous tides of religious and political zeal roiling the country, the uses of the call to patriotism, and the cult of sacrifice she believes is currently paralyzing national debate. Ultimately, Samet offers an honest and original reflection on the relationship between art and life.

In the wake of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home and Art Spiegelman’s Maus comes cartoonist Carol Tyler’s multigenerational graphic memoir, You’ll Never Know. The author chronicles her fraught relationship with her father, Charles, a WWII veteran, and how the war affected their lives through both childhood and adulthood. You’ll Never Know is also a tribute to servicemen and women, dramatizing the trauma of the war on the Greatest Generation and those who followed. Tyler’s ink and watercolor narrative is in turns sprawling and gimlet-eyed: compassionate and enraged. Her father’s memories are woven into her own, which span her Catholic, Midwestern childhood; her troubled marriage; her daughter’s struggles; and her efforts to care for her aging parents. Even though Tyler’s work has an accessible, homemade feel (the organizing metaphor of the book is a photo album with “snapshots” of Tyler family life), You’ll Never Know is a sophisticated graphic work about war, love, and loss.

In June 1861, when the Civil War began, Charley Goddard enlisted in the First Minnesota Volunteers. He was 15. He didn't know what a "shooting war" meant or what he was fighting for. But he didn't want to miss out on a great adventure. The "shooting war" turned out to be the horror of combat and the wild luck of survival; how it feels to cross a field toward the enemy, waiting for fire. When he entered the service he was a boy. When he came back he was different; he was only 19, but he was a man with "soldier's heart," later known as "battle fatigue."

Living in the shadowy interior of the brain's limbic system and invisible to the untrained eye, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder can not only torture its victims for a lifetime, but reaches beyond victims to negatively influence family members and loved ones. Soldier's Heart, titled after one of the early names for PTSD, delves into the lives of otherwise normal American veterans who, seemingly for no reason, display lasting patterns of bad choices and erratic, self-destructive behavior. Analysis of the life portraits of combat veterans brings the myriad symptoms of PTSD to light, equipping the lay reader to recognize the disorder and gain a thorough understanding that can be the foundation for steps to facilitate healing. Four men and one woman who served in Vietnam describe how PTSD still tears at their lives 30 years later. The symptoms of PTSD are conveyed in non-technical language by the veterans featured in this absorbing work, presented by authors Schroder and Dawe, both Vietnam veterans and, respectively, now a writer-businessman and a mental health counselor. To fully explore the lifelong effects of war trauma in the 20th century, the focus must be on Vietnam veterans, explain Schroder and Dawe. Profound statements on the human condition, the narratives of the five featured veterans, from across branches of the military, offer emotional and intellectual comfort to millions of Americans whose relatives and friends have served the country in time of war. This book, which also includes a glossary of military terms, will be of interest to veterans and their families, as well as to counselors, therapists, psychologists, veteran care workers and students of studies in trauma, psychopthology, and treatment. These are more than war stories, because for these veterans the lingering war is internal—and it may never end.

A Special Forces soldier, working in a secret organization, leads tribal warriors in a war in South East Asia. He loses his humanity and struggles to understand the root of violence within us all. Inspirational, soul searching, informative and uplifting.

The commanding officer of an infantry battalion in Vietnam in 1969 recounts how he took over a demoralized unit of ordinary draftees and turned it into an elite fighting force, and describes its accomplishments.

A Soldier’s Heart is a moving and expansive memoir by Vietnam Veteran Ray Gauvin. The story takes us from the French Ghetto of Presque Isle, Maine, and the descendants of the Acadians, to military bases all over the country, and to Vietnam and back. Gauvin takes an unflinching look at life on the ground in Saigon and the horrors of the unusual and classified military posting of WDMET. The ingenuity and work ethic he built to help support his family as a kid got him through both the loss of his father and the war. But afterwards, pushing himself to the edge with striving and responsibility became a compulsion that staved off the nightmare. Silent about the classified mission of WDMET, even to his family, Gauvin wrestled on his own with the effects of Agent Orange and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. He became an entrepreneur, a businessman, and a philanthropist, but PTSD kept him embroiled in an internal battle between his obsession to work, his drive for success, a search for peace of mind, and thoughts of suicide. But after fifty years of running from the past, he turned about-face, and began the journey of remembering and healing. This book is a must read for anyone seeking an inside look at one man’s road to Vietnam, and WDMET. It also gives incredible insight into the history of francophone communities in Northern Maine.

Wounded army officer Luke Marino was senthome, his career, his spirit shattered. Now hewanted only to be left alone, refusing even thephysical therapy he needed. But Mary Kate Flanagan Donnelly, a widowwith two children to raise on her own, needed Luke's case to prove herself as a capabletherapist. Despite the revival of feelings shethought dormant since their high schoolromance, she was determined to helpthe stubborn hero and keep mattersstrictly business….