I created playlists: music to reflect the roll and thunder, the emotions and events in the book.

RELEASE DAY IS HERE!

Delighted to share this video with Vartan Abdo of PAREV TV, advocate for Armenians and Armenian arts and culture. We talked about my nonfiction books, Undesirable: The Vietnam War and a Father’s Battle for Justice (July 2026, University of New Mexico Press) and my book of memoirs, The Unruly Past (2021, Paint Creek Press). Both books, labors of love, testaments to family.

If my father had learned one brutal lesson in his battles with the Army, it was that documents disappeared.

Intentional, institutional choices on the part of the Army to shield a general

This Memorial Day, let us also remember those who did not die but who were never again whole.

An unlikely alignment of life and work, the present and the past.

A stranger will do you a significant kindness.

Frankie “went to Vietnam as a patriot and came home as a pariah.” She was not alone.

When I went home for Christmas, 1970, my brother Doug had been back from Vietnam for just over three months. I do not remember him as especially weird, save that he had learned to sleep with his eyes open when he was in Vietnam.

Each book, as it is about to go out into the world, becomes a sort of actor in the wings, awaiting the cue to go onstage, and I the anxious manager, fussing over everything, touch ups, makeup refreshed, costume tidied, in short, nonstop revision applied at every turn.