In rapid succession, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy were murdered, the Chicago Police went crazy and got away with it, Richard Nixon got elected president with a secret plan to end the war that turned out to be the invasion of Cambodia, the killing of four college kids not much different from me during my first year of college by murderers who got away with it, publication of the Pentagon Papers a year later that proved the war was an unwinnable lie perpetrated by powerful men who did not care about me and my buddies who had done their dirty work, a bogus “peace treaty” that ended nothing, a president who did indeed turn out to be a crook but got away with it because he was pardoned by his handpicked successor, and still a war in Vietnam that just went on and on and on as if somebody were constantly banging on my skull with a ballpeen hammer.
That’s a very long paragraph, and it’s filled with years of anger, and that isn’t even the half of it. But in December of 1974, I happened to be passing through New York, so I stopped in Brooklyn to visit Jan Barry, whom I’d first gotten to know a few years earlier when he was an editor of Winning Hearts and Minds: War Poems by Vietnam Veterans, to which I’d contributed some poems.
The makeshift publishing company that had put out that book in 1972 had intended to do a follow-up volume dealing with the veteran experience after returning to the US, but the editors had since scattered to the wind because, like me, they were all young and restless.
But Jan and I got to talking, and I don’t recall which of us brought up the idea, but between us we decided we’d put together that follow-up anthology. We worked on it for the next 18 months, collecting and reading hundreds and hundreds of poems, writing hundreds of letters, raising the money to publish, getting what were then called the “blue lines” printed, and doing the design and paste-up ourselves.
Over the many months we worked on the book, the hollow Saigon regime that had been invented and sustained by US military might and American tax dollars collapsed like the house of cards it was, North Vietnamese and National Liberation Front soldiers entered what got renamed Ho Chi Minh City, and the endless war in Vietnam finally ended. Almost as rapidly as the end of the war had come, the American people turned their collective backs on the war, entered into what I can only call a prolonged and self-induced state of national amnesia, and feverishly—almost hysterically—geared up to celebrate the American Bicentennial.
By the time Demilitarized Zones: Veterans After Vietnam was officially published on July 4, 1976, almost no one was interested in the book or the American War in Vietnam.
I wasn’t happy about any of it, but I could deal with it because of what I had learned from Jan Barry over the previous year and a half. Jan taught me—showed me by example—how to direct my rage and pain and frustration into constructive channels. In spite of everything that had preceded our collaboration, through all the tumultuous events taking place during our collaboration, Jan continued to believe that what we were doing mattered, that words matter, that art will always be worthwhile.
This essay is not supposed to be about me. I set out to write about Jan Barry and his new book, Waging Peace: From Vietnam to Volgograd (Jan Barry Books, 2025: www.janbarry.net). But I need to put into context what amazes me most about this book. Through all the years since we first worked together, and to this day, Jan has never lost his belief that words matter, that good might yet prevail, that peace is possible.
Jan says this book is not a memoir or a biography, and it really isn’t. Yet the one hundred and six chapters spanning nearly three hundred pages really do constitute a history of his life. And if you honestly don’t know it, Jan Barry is a monumental figure in the pantheon of true American heroes and patriots. A historical giant. A fundamental fixture of the antiwar movement over the past sixty years. Or as he would insist on calling it, not the antiwar movement, but the Peace Movement.
One of his most characteristic beliefs comes from a poem called “The Peacemaker” by Walker Knight: “Peace, like war, is waged.” Jan Barry has been actively and energetically waging peace since he turned away from an appointment to the US Military Academy and chose a very different path into his own future.
Early chapters of this book describe his upbringing in rural Republican upstate New York, where he grew up in the shadow of an uncle who had died in a navy dive bomber in the Pacific the year after Jan was born in 1943. Long before Jan got to high school, his idol was Dwight Eisenhower, and Jan himself wanted to go to West Point and become a general and a hero, too. Unable to secure an appointment to the academy, he started college, but quit and enlisted in the army in 1962, serving a tour in Vietnam from late 1962 deep into 1963.
He finally got his appointment to West Point “from the ranks” as it was called, but what he experienced there—hazing by upperclassmen, bullying, duplicity, dishonesty, nonsensical punishments for piddling infractions—combined with a program that was explicitly training cadets to go into combat in a war that Jan realized as a 21-year-old enlisted man was pointless and unwinnable, led him to walk away from West Point and a military career.
Drifting from job to job in New Jersey and New York while trying to find an effective way to express his opposition to the growing war in Asia, he was working at the New York Public Library when, in April 1967, he took part in an antiwar march. A few other young men were carrying a sign that said, “Vietnam Veterans Against the War,” though there was no actual organization with that name. However, after the march, these young men decided there really ought to be. Out of this chance meeting grew what became arguably the most influential element of the anti-Vietnam War movement, and Jan Barry was its first president.
Much of the first half of Waging Peace is devoted to the Vietnam War, resistance to it, and its lingering consequences. There are vivid vignettes of key people like Dave Cline (featured in the documentary Sir! No, Sir!), Clarence Fitch (featured in the book A Matter of Conscience), Doug Rawlings (first poet laureate of Veterans for Peace), Gerald McCarthy (author of Hitchhiking Home from Danang), Gloria Emerson (whose Winners & Losers: Battles, Retreats, Gains, Losses, and Ruins from the Vietnam War won a National Book Award), Paula Kay Pierce (Jan’s wife of thirty years, who died of cancer at 59), and many others.
In the interest of full disclosure, I must say that Jan even includes an essay about me. He also includes one on John Kerry, which I think is far too kind to him, given Kerry’s subsequent failure as a senator to investigate the Iran-Contra Scandal, and his willingness as secretary of state to send another generation of young Americans to die in unwinnable wars like the one he claimed to decry in 1971, but I suppose that’s just Jan being Jan.
This book, however, is not just about the Vietnam War, nor has Jan’s life been just about that war. He has, in fact, been waging peace for most of his life. Always deeply involved in community affairs and local government in his capacity as a journalist and reporter for several New Jersey newspapers, he helped create New Jersey’s Essex County Office on Peace, the publisher of record for his booklet The Great Challenge: How You Can Help Prevent Nuclear War. He got involved in developing a people-to-people program of “citizen diplomacy” that led to his traveling to the Soviet Union with a New Jersey delegation, then hosting a visit by Soviet citizens.
Multiple chapters of this book deal with the threat of nuclear war and the efforts of a great many people Jan has worked with to reduce this threat. There’s a fascinating chapter on The Golden Rule, the sailboat that tried in 1958 to sail into Pacific waters used by the US to test nuclear bombs as a protest against nukes, and how the boat was literally resurrected from the bottom of Humboldt Bay, restored, and sails again as a floating ambassador for peace and environmental justice (https://vfpgoldenruleproject.org/).
The Golden Rule Sailboat
Still other chapters illuminate efforts to prevent or at least protest the “Reagan Wars” in Central America, the futility of America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the terrible consequences of those pointless wars on the young Americans who have fought them, and the efforts of Jan Barry and other artists and poets to mitigate those consequences through programs like Warrior Writers (https://www.warriorwriters.org/) and Combat Paper (now known as Frontline Arts: https://www.frontlinearts.org/).
And you’ll find more profiles of other important people integral to the cause of peace, some famous and others who should be: Daniel Ellsberg of Pentagon Papers fame and author of The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner; late 19th and early 20th century poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox; television host Phil Donohue (fired by MSNBC for expressing skepticism about the US invasion of Iraq in 2003), artist Jane Irish (https://janeirish.com/), Barry Romo (longtime national coordinator of VVAW until his death in 2024.
There is also a large selection of poems included in the book, some by other poets, many by Jan himself. This one of Jan’s has always been a favorite of mine:
In the Footsteps of Genghis Khan
There, where a French legionnaire
once walked patrol
around the flightline perimeter of the airfield
at Nha Trang,
ten years later I walked,
in American expeditionary forces
soldier on night guard duty
at Nha Trang,
occupied even earlier,
twenty years before
(a year more than my nineteen),
by the Japanese.
Unhaunted by the ghosts, living and dead
among us
in the red tile-roofed French barracks
or listening in on the old Japanese telephone line
to Saigon,
we went about our military duties,
setting up special forces headquarters
where once a French legion post had been,
oblivious to the irony
of Americans walking in the footsteps
of Genghis Khan
Unemcumbered by history,
our own or that of 13th-century Mongol armies
long since fled or buried
by the Vietnamese,
in Nha Trang, in 1962, we just did our jobs:
replacing kepis with berets, “Ah so!” with “Gawd! Damn!”
All through the book, I encounter over and over again Jan’s refusal to give in to despair, his unwavering belief that good will eventually come of good-willed people acting together. (Another one of his books is 2000’s A Citizen’s Guide to Grassroots Campaigns.) He has a chapter on creating a cabinet-level Department of Peace, a notion that’s been around for generations without ever gaining any traction in Congress, yet he writes about it as if it is still an achievable goal. He writes glowingly of West Point graduate Paul Chappell’s 2009 book Will War Ever End? A Soldier’s Vision of Peace for the 21st Century.)
But this book is not Pollyanna stuff. This is not Dr. Pangloss’s “best of all possible worlds,” as Jan makes clear in his final few essays. He criticizes Barak Obama’s ridiculous proclamation marking the beginning of the so-called Commemoration of the 50th Anniversary of the Vietnam War. He challenges Americans to protest and resist the agenda of the “tyrannical head of state” now occupying the White House. He urges all of us to vigorously and actively support federal employees, LGBTQ rights, immigrant rights, Palestinian self-determination, and a free and independent Ukraine.
In reading this book, I found myself remembering once again why I have loved and admired Jan Barry for over half a century, why he is such an inspiration to anyone who cares about trying to create a better world, why there is nothing to be gained from despair and hopelessness, and why there is everything to be gained by continuing to do what each of us can.
Here, in a few words, is what Jan Barry taught me: take that rage and pain and frustration, and do something constructive with it.
William “Bill” Daniel Ehrhart is an American poet, writer, scholar, and Vietnam veteran. He received the Purple Heart Medal and the Navy Combat Action Ribbon for his service in Vietnam. He holds a PhD from the University of Wales at Swansea. Ehrhart has been called “the dean of Vietnam war poetry” and is the author of more than 30 books, including Vietnam Perkasie: A Combat Marine Memoir, Passing Time: Memoir of a Vietnam Veteran Against the War, Busted: A Vietnam Veteran in Nixon’s America, and Thank You for Your Service: Collected Poems. His most recent book is What We Can and Can’t Afford: Essays on Vietnam, Patriotism, and American Life(McFarland, 2023).