Nathan with his beloved only child Elisa visiting Snoqualmie Falls three months before he passed away from leukemia.
A tribute to IC’s brother Nathan Alexander.
Nathan’s obituary
Video of prelude to Nathan’s Memorial Service
Video of main part of service with family and friends speaking
Video of end of service with dad speaking and bagpipes
Eulogy from mom and dad
Pics from Memorial Service at Troy U. on Aug. 24, 2009 (not complete yet) […]
Most scholarship on Vietnam has focused on American hubris and defeat, ignoring the role of the South Vietnamese armed services while overemphasizing the role of the North Vietnamese desire to unify their country. Recently, Vietnam Veterans are beginning to challenge this narrow view with their own written accounts of the Vietnam war.
Never has a war inspired the imagination (lurid and otherwise) of so many Americans, and yet the lives of the actual soldiers interested so few. A review of B.G. Burkett and Glenna Whitley’s Stolen Valor and Gerald Nicosia’s Home to War.
This book tells the story of every American POW in Indochina, detailing everything from the torture they endured to their communication of tapping and methods of resistance.
In his book M.I.A. or Mythmaking in America, H. Bruce Franklin attempts to establish that the POW “myth” was created by the Nixon White House in order to extend the Vietnam War. His first speculations about potentially unaccounted for servicemen suggest that they may have been deserters who formed new families, got involved with drug trafficking, or helped lead attacks on U.S. forces.
The Vietnam war will not be over until less attention is given to resurrecting the ghosts of the past, and more to those who solider on and carry the very real burdens of America’s South East Asian war.
The strange new respect for Vietnam veterans is temporary, only a brevet promotion, the result of partisan opportunity and media obsession. Those who hanker for that sort of attention should relish their fifteen minutes of respectability.