Comment...RecommendedAll
Sunday, May 28, 2017
Saturday, May 27, 2017
TomorrowI'mGoing
Tomorrow I'm going
***
Tomorrow I'm going...It's no big a deal,
It happens all the time, like fallen leaves in the park
Like flowers driven by winds onto the sidewalk,
These are minor matters in the turbulent waters of life...
Death is hovering over my deathbed,
Please spare me of comments, visitations, or prayers of peace
While my breathing is going to cease
And I'm lying, waiting to bid farewell.
These last dying moments...I wouldn't care less..
The hot and cold months on this planet.
No matter I'm rich or full of glory,
At the end I still return to dust and ashes ...
My finite existence decisively comes to an end
And enters the yin and yang borderlands
I won't be bewildered at the frontier's gate
Earthly realm is on this side, the other an unimaginable and unknown fate
I only wish my soul is always at peace,
Traveling lightly, I quicken my pace
Leaving behind those who push and pull,
While I finish my journey on earth's face...
My eyes are already closed....please don't shed tears of sympathy
Please, no flower wreaths, no offerings, nor condolences,
No videotaping, no picture taking for memories.
That would only bring stresses and strains to the surviving...
A quick look behind and life is just like a dream
I arrived naked and I'm leaving with empty hands
Many ups and downs, happy and sad moments piled high,
Now they're all cleared up...I'm stepping on board, the boat has arrived...
If you miss me...Please silently pray,
And consider a life has been liberated,
Be calm, relaxed, and gay,
I go first, you follow behind, we'll meet again...
Wissai Ngô Khoa Bá
Mai tôi đi
Mai tôi đi...chẳng có gì quan trọng,
Lẽ thường tình, như lá rụng công viên,
Như hoa rơi trước gió ở bên thềm,
Chuyện bé nhỏ giữa giòng đời động loạn...
Trên giường bệnh, Tử Thần về thấp thoáng,
Xin miễn bàn, thăm hỏi hoặc cầu an,
Khi xác thân thoi thóp trút hơi tàn,
Nằm hấp hối đợi chờ giờ vĩnh biệt.
Khoảnh khắc cuối... Đâu còn gì tha thiết...
Những tháng ngày hàn nhiệt ở trần gian.
Dù giàu sang hay danh vọng đầy tràn,
Cũng buông bỏ trở về cùng cát bụi...
Sẽ dứt điểm đời phù du ngắn ngủi,
Để đi vào ranh giới của âm dương,
Không bàng hoàng trước ngưỡng cửa biên cương,
Bên trần tục, bên vô hình cõi lạ...
Chỉ ước nguyện tâm hồn luôn thư thả,
Với hành trang thanh nhẹ bước qua nhanh,
Quên đàng sau những níu kéo giựt dành,
Kết thúc cuộc lữ hành trên dương thế...
Mắt nhắm rồi... Xin đừng thương rơi lệ,
Đừng vòng hoa, phúng điếu hoặc phân ưu,
Đừng quay phim, chụp ảnh để dành lưu.
Gây phiền toái, nợ thêm người còn sống...
Ngoảnh nhìn lại, đời người như giấc mộng,
Đến trần truồng và đi vẫn tay không.
Bao trầm thăng, vui khổ đã chất chồng,
Nay rũ sạch...lên bờ, thuyền đến bến...
Nếu tưởng nhớ..Xin âm thầm cầu nguyện,
Nên xem như giải thoát một kiếp người,
Cứ bình tâm, thoải mái với vui tươi,
Kẻ đi trước, người sau rồi sẽ gặp...
LoveIsStillHere
Love Is Still Here
Last night a heavy rain arrived
Roads were flooded and slippery
Last night a dormant feeling revived
Surely I would not think of thee
Alas, easier said than done
I wanted to forget, but I pined a ton
Longing kept flooding my brain
More numerous than drops of rain
Last night the rain awoke
Cold winds and raindrops
My soul stirred up and choked
My haunted heart skipped and hopped
Upon waking up this morning, words fell
On paper page as I unburdened my soul
Love has bidden me farewell
But why for you my heart still has a hole
Oh, honey, my love for you is still here
Why are you so cold to me?
Why haven't you written, my dear?
Last night the returning rain revived my love for thee
Translated by Roberto Wissai
May 27, 2017
Tình vẫn còn đây
Đêm qua có cơn mưa lớn
Mưa về ngập nước đường trơn
Đêm qua hồi sinh tư tưởng
Nhất định không nhớ người thương
Nói dễ nhưng làm không dễ
Muốn quên càng nhớ ngập lòng
Nỗi nhớ leo thang mênh mông
Nhiều hơn những giọt mưa mòng
Đêm qua mưa về đánh thức
Gió lạnh kèm theo mưa rơi
Em thấy lòng mình thổn thức
Muốn quên chẳng được người ơi
Sáng ra thức dậy buông lơi
Làm thơ trãi lòng lên giấy
Tình đã vĩnh viễn mù khơi
Sao vẫn thương nhớ vơi đầy?
Anh ơi tình em vẫn đây
Sao anh lạnh lùng thế vậy
Đã lâu không viết cho nhau
Mưa về, sống dậy tình này !
Anne Zwei
May 6th, 2017
Đêm qua có cơn mưa lớn
Mưa về ngập nước đường trơn
Đêm qua hồi sinh tư tưởng
Nhất định không nhớ người thương
Nói dễ nhưng làm không dễ
Muốn quên càng nhớ ngập lòng
Nỗi nhớ leo thang mênh mông
Nhiều hơn những giọt mưa mòng
Đêm qua mưa về đánh thức
Gió lạnh kèm theo mưa rơi
Em thấy lòng mình thổn thức
Muốn quên chẳng được người ơi
Sáng ra thức dậy buông lơi
Làm thơ trãi lòng lên giấy
Tình đã vĩnh viễn mù khơi
Sao vẫn thương nhớ vơi đầy?
Anh ơi tình em vẫn đây
Sao anh lạnh lùng thế vậy
Đã lâu không viết cho nhau
Mưa về, sống dậy tình này !
Anne Zwei
May 6th, 2017
Brzezinski
Zbigniew Brzezinski, the hawkish strategic theorist who was national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter in the tumultuous years of the Iran hostage crisis and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the late 1970s, died on Friday at a hospital in Virginia. He was 89.
His death, at Inova Fairfax Hospital in Falls Church, was announced on Friday by his daughter, Mika Brzezinski, a co-host of the MSNBC program “Morning Joe.”
Like his predecessor Henry A. Kissinger, Mr. Brzezinski was a foreign-born scholar (he in Poland, Mr. Kissinger in Germany) with considerable influence in global affairs, both before and long after his official tour of duty in the White House. In essays, interviews and television appearances over the decades, he cast a sharp eye on six successive administrations, including that of Donald J. Trump, whose election he did not support and whose foreign policy, he found, lacked coherence.
Mr. Brzezinski was nominally a Democrat, with views that led him to speak out, for example, against the “greed,” as he put it, of an American system that compounded inequality. He was one of the few foreign policy experts to warn against the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
But in at least one respect — his rigid hatred of the Soviet Union — he had stood to the right of many Republicans, including Mr. Kissinger and President Richard M. Nixon. And during his four years under Mr. Carter, beginning in 1977, thwarting Soviet expansionism at any cost guided much of American foreign policy, for better or worse.
He supported billions in military aid for Islamic militants fighting invading Soviet troops in Afghanistan. He tacitly encouraged China to continue backing the murderous regime of Pol Pot in Cambodia, lest the Soviet-backed Vietnamese take over that country.
He managed to delay implementation of the SALT II arms treaty in 1979 by raising objections to Soviet behavior in Vietnam, Africa and Cuba; and when the Soviets went into Afghanistan late that year, “SALT disappeared from the U.S.-Soviet agenda,” as he noted in a memoir four years later.
Mr. Brzezinski, a descendant of Polish aristocrats (his name is pronounced Z-BIG-nyehv breh-ZHIHN-skee), was a severe, even intimidating figure, penetrating eyes and strong Polish accent. Washington quickly learned that he had sharp elbows as well. He was adept at seizing the spotlight and freezing out the official spokesman on foreign policy, Secretary of State Cyrus R. Vance, provoking conflicts that ultimately led to Mr. Vance’s resignation.
Where Mr. Vance had endorsed the Nixon-Kissinger policy of a “triangular” power balance among the United States, China and the Soviet Union, Mr. Brzezinski scorned such “acrobatics,” as he called them. He advocated instead what he called a deliberate “strategic deterioration” in relations with Moscow, and closer ties to China.
Moving Fast
By his own account, he blitzed Mr. Carter with memos until he got permission to go to Beijing in May 1978, over State Department resistance, to begin talks that would lead to full diplomatic relations seven months later. Immediately after the trip, he appeared on “Meet the Press,” unleashing a slashing attack on the Soviet Union that Mr. Vance deplored as “loose talk.”
Mr. Brzezinski was also a prime mover behind the commando mission sent to rescue the American hostages held by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s revolutionary forces in Iran after the overthrow of the shah of Iran, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi — a disastrous desert expedition in April 1980 that claimed eight lives and never reached Tehran. Mr. Vance had not been informed of the mission until a few days before. It was the final straw: He quit, “stunned and angry,” he said.
Mr. Brzezinski’s rationale for the rescue attempt was, perhaps inevitably, rooted in his preoccupation with Soviet influence. He contended that trying to gain the release of the hostages through sanctions and other diplomatic measures “would deliver Iran to the Soviets,” although many thought that outcome highly improbable, given the fundamentalism of the clerics running the country. Besides, he said, success would “give the United States a shot in the arm, which it has badly needed for 20 years,” a reference to the quagmire of the Vietnam War.
Soviet aggression in Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America was by no means a figment of Mr. Brzesinki’s imagination. But his strict adherence to ideas in which virtually every issue circled back to the threat of Soviet domination was remarkable even for those tense times, when many in the foreign policy establishment had come to regard détente — a general easing of the geopolitical tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States — as the best course.
In his scholarly certitude, Mr. Brzezinski sometimes showed a tendency to believe that any disagreement between theory and reality indicated some fault on the part of reality. In his 1962 book “Ideology and Power in Soviet Politics,” for example, he asserted that the Communist bloc “is not splitting and is not likely to split” just as Beijing and Moscow were breaking apart.
With the breakup of the Soviet Union, Mr. Brzezinski allowed that it would make sense for the United States to engage with Russia, though cautiously, as well as China, “to support global stability.” And although he condemned Russian meddling in elections in the United States and elsewhere, he thought the effects were only marginal relative to the underlying problems shaking up Western societies.
In any case, aside from his ideological principles, he had both personal and historical reasons for abhorring the Soviet system.
A Soviet Refugee
Zbigniew Kazimierz Brzezinski was born in Warsaw on March 28, 1928. His father, Tadeusz, was a diplomat who took the family along to France, then to Germany during the rise of Hitler in the 1930s and, fortuitously, to Canada on the eve of World War II. When the Russians took over Poland at the end of the war, Tadeusz Brzezinski chose to retire in Canada rather than return home.
The younger Mr. Brzezinski graduated from McGill University in Montreal in 1949 and earned a master’s degree there in 1950. Then it was on to Harvard, which granted him a doctorate in political science in 1953 and appointed him as an instructor. He and Mr. Kissinger were among the candidates for a faculty position; when Mr. Kissinger won an associate professorship in 1959, Mr. Brzezinski decamped to Columbia University.
He was not always consistent in his positions as he moved between one situation and another. When he was appointed to the State Department’s Policy Planning Council in 1966, he had already become an outspoken defender of United States engagement in the Vietnam conflict.
In 1968, after riotous antiwar protests at Columbia and elsewhere, he wrote in The New Republic that students should not be allowed to “rally again under the same leadership,” meaning they should be tried and incarcerated.
“If that leadership cannot be physically liquidated, it can at least be expelled from the country,” he wrote.
That same year, however, he resigned from the State Department planning council as a protest against expanded American involvement in the war in Indochina under President Lyndon B. Johnson.
Then he became a foreign policy adviser to Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, who defended the expansion in his 1968 presidential campaign.
His bond with Jimmy Carter developed through the Trilateral Commission, the group David Rockefeller created in 1973 as a forum for political and business leaders from North America, Western Europe and Japan to consider the challenges facing industrialized countries. Mr. Brzezinski was the commission’s first director. (Mr. Rockefeller died in March.)
In 1974, Mr. Brzezinski invited Mr. Carter, then the governor of Georgia and a rising Democratic star, to become a member. Two years later, Mr. Carter was the Democratic nominee for president, and he hired Mr. Brzezinski as a foreign affairs adviser.
Vying for Influence
From the start of his tenure as Mr. Carter’s national security adviser, Mr. Brzezinski jockeyed for power. He reserved for himself the right to give Mr. Carter his daily intelligence briefing, which had previously been the prerogative of the Central Intelligence Agency. He frequently called journalists to his office for what he called “exclusive” not-for-attribution briefings in which he would put his own spin on events, to the annoyance of Mr. Vance.
And although he was familiarly called Zbig and could be very engaging, he was quick to smack down reporters who dared to challenge his ideas. “I just cut off your head,” he told a journalist after one such retort.
A prolific author, Mr. Brzezinski published a memoir in 1983 about his White House years, “Power and Principle,” in which he recalled a range of policy objectives that went beyond containing the Soviets. “First,” he wrote, “I thought it was important to try to increase America’s ideological impact on the world” — to make it again the “carrier of human hope, the wave of the future.”
He also said that he had aimed to restore America’s appeal in the developing world through better economic relations, but acknowledged that he had concentrated too much of his attention on those countries that he felt were threatened by Soviet or Cuban takeovers.
More recently, in opposing the invasion of Iraq, he predicted that “an America that decides to act essentially on its own” could “find itself quite alone in having to cope with the costs and burdens of the war’s aftermath, not to mention widespread and rising hostility abroad.”
In “Second Chance: Three Presidents and the Crisis of American Superpower,” published in 2007, he assessed the consequences of that war and criticized the successive administrations of George Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush for failing to take advantage of the possibilities for American leadership from the time the Berlin Wall came down in 1989. He considered George W. Bush’s record, especially, “catastrophic.” And in the 2008 presidential campaign, he wholeheartedly supported Barack Obama.
Four years later, he once again assessed the United States’ global standing in “Strategic Vision: America and the Crisis of Global Power.” Here he argued that continued American strength abroad was vital to global stability, but that it would depend on the country’s ability to foster “social consensus and democratic stability” at home.
Essential to those goals, he wrote, would be a narrowing of the yawning income gap between the wealthiest and the rest, a restructuring of the financial system so that it no longer mainly benefited “greedy Wall Street speculators” and a meaningful response to climate change.
A United States in decline, he said — one “unwilling or unable to protect states it once considered, for national interest and/or doctrinal reasons, worthy of its engagement” — could lead to a “protracted phase of rather inconclusive and somewhat chaotic realignments of both global and regional power, with no grand winners and many more losers.”
Mr. Brzezinski, who had homes in Washington and Northeast Harbor, Me., was married to the Czech-American sculptor Emilie Benes, with whom he had two children in addition to Ms. Brzezinski: Mark Brzezinski, a lawyer and former ambassador to Sweden under President Barack Obama, and Ian Brzezinski, whose career has included serving as a deputy assistant secretary of defense. All survive him. He is also survived by a brother, Lech, and five grandchildren.
Into his 80s Mr. Brzezinski was still fully active as a teacher, author and consultant: a professor of foreign policy at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, a scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and a frequent expert commentator on PBS and ABC News.
He was, in short, a man who could be counted on to have strong opinions, and a boundless eagerness to share them. Once, in 1994, he even put forward a sort of disarmament program to solve the problem of breaking ties in the final game of the soccer World Cup.
“In the event of a tie,” he wrote to the sports editor of The Times, “the game should be resumed as a sudden-death overtime, but played with only nine players on each side, with each team compelled to remove two of its defensive players. That change increases the probability of a score and places more emphasis on offensive play. If after 10 minutes of play there is still no score, the game continues with four defenders removed from each team.”
David Binder, Daniel E. Slotnik and Matthew Haag contributed reporting.
Friday, May 26, 2017
WarTraumas
The ancient Greeks didn’t go to the theater just to be entertained. Aristotle believed that audiences saw themselves reflected in tragic characters and that the very act of watching a character’s downfall helped purge them of emotions like pity and fear, a process he called catharsis or, roughly, “purification.”
More than 2,500 years later, a young classics major named Bryan Doerries wondered whether he could help a growing and vulnerable population in need of catharsis: veterans of the long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, many of whom come home from combat with depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and suicidal thoughts.
His idea became a project he calls Theater of War, which has now staged more than 400 performances for veterans across the country. He asked high-profile actors, including Adam Driver, Frances McDormand and David Strathairn, to read from the war plays of Sophocles. After the reading, the veterans in the audience talk about their own trauma and their trouble readjusting to civilian life.
The project has attracted thousands of veterans and their families as they try to readjust to life away from the battlefield. It isn’t an easy process.
“You create a permissive enough environment where people can speak truth,” Mr. Doerries said. “The Greeks have a word which means ‘balanced-mindedness,’ which was the ideal of the fifth century. So how do you rebalance the mind of an Athenian? Part of the answer is to give them the opportunity to vent and purge these emotions that can’t be bottled up.”
Inspired by the example of Theater of War, we have created our own version of Sophocles’ poetry. We asked a dozen or so veterans to read passages from two of his war plays and to talk about what the passages meant to them. We turned their readings and their comments into two videos — one about a soldier’s suicide and the other about living with injury.
One, called “A Warrior’s Last Words,” is adapted from the play “Ajax” and shows Ajax and his wife, Tecmessa, as he contemplates suicide. The other video, “If Men Don’t Know My Story,” is a speech from the play “Philoctetes” (pronounced fill-ock-TEE-tees), in which a badly wounded soldier describes how the generals abandoned him on an island for nine years.
So instead of getting insights into themselves by listening to Greek poetry, these veterans are using the poetry to give us insight into their own experience.
“The first time I heard Ajax’s speech, it knocked me back in my chair,” said Jeff Hall, a retired Army commander from Oklahoma who struggled with depression and suicidal thoughts after returning from Iraq. “It was me. I could see how he was betrayed in the text.”
Mr. Hall’s wife, Sheri, is the voice of Tecmessa in the video — the long-suffering spouse of Ajax, who lives in fear of her husband’s dark thoughts.
“She was walking around on eggshells and so were we during our time of Jeff’s PTSD onset, and the things going on with his anger and his depression,” she said. “It really spoke to me, especially with what she was dealing with. I was going through the same things.”
While Sophocles is better remembered for writing “Antigone” and “Oedipus Rex,” he was also a general in the Athenian Army and lived during the decades-long Peloponnesian War. He wrote “Ajax” and “Philoctetes” for audiences that most likely included his army’s own soldiers.
“The theme that’s most prevalent in both plays is betrayal. And betrayal, I’d argue and many others have argued, is the wound that cuts the deepest,” said Mr. Doerries, who wrote a memoir about the creation of his company called “Theater of War: What Ancient Greek Tragedies Can Teach Us Today.”
Theater directors typically look for new material or new venues. Mr. Doerries has made a specialty of seeking out new audiences for ancient texts. He mounted a reading of the Book of Job for people affected by Hurricane Sandy, Hurricane Katrina and the Fukushima nuclear accident and has done versions of “Prometheus Bound” for prison guards, including those at Guantánamo Bay.
But most of his work involves Sophocles and American veterans. In addition to his memoir, he has published his translations of Greek tragedies and even wrote a graphic novel about a United States Marine based on the story of Odysseus. He was recently named the public artist in residence by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and the Department of Veterans’ Services. This weekend, he’s hosting another Theater of War event in New York at the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum.
Gregory Gadson, a retired Army colonel who fought in the gulf war of 1991, Bosnia, Iraq and Afghanistan, is one beneficiary of Theater of War. In 2007, he lost both his legs above the knee from a roadside bomb blast in Baghdad. In our project, he reads the part of Philoctetes, the wounded soldier who is abandoned on an island by his army.
“On the surface, it sounds very simple,” said Mr. Gadson, who stayed on active duty after the bombing. “But it’s very deep, and having lived 50 years of my life, it’s very relevant today. It touches my soul.”
Many of the veterans who participated came from a military family, often going back generations. Jack Eubanks, who reads “Philoctetes,” comes from a long line of soldiers and is distantly related to George Washington. He was injured twice in Iraq and once in Afghanistan, and spent more than three years recovering from his brain injuries, relearning to talk, read and walk.
Not all their wounds are physical. Jenny Pacanowski, who contributed to “If Men Don’t Know My Story,” said that the plays resonate with veterans still because Sophocles shows the pain of soldiers trying to balance their anger at the generals with their shame at failing to live up to their fathers’ examples.
“My father had me in boxing and kickboxing when I was 9. So he was raising a warrior,” said Ms. Pacanowski, whose father was a Marine.
“I can feel it in my chest,” she said about Sophocles’ insight. “It’s real for us.”
The Veterans
J C Bravo joined the Marines at age 19, then enlisted in the Army as an officer in 1999, serving tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. He continues to be on active duty. He works for a Department of Defense contractor and volunteers with the Wounded Warrior Project.
Brandon Caro joined the Navy as a combat medic in 2004, serving one deployment in Afghanistan. He is the author of the novel “Old Silk Road,” which was nominated for the 2015 Indie Fab Award, and a co-author (with Carl Higbie) of the memoir “Enemies, Foreign and Domestic.” Also a songwriter, he lives in Kiev, Ukraine.
Maurice Decaul joined the Marines (“out of Flatbush, Brooklyn”) in 1997, serving in the Fleet Marine Force from 1998 to 2002, then a tour of Iraq with the Marine reserves in 2003. He is a graduate student at Brown University studying playwriting, and he runs the Veterans and Theater Institute, which creates theater opportunities for veterans.
Norman Easy joined the Army in 1985 and served in the New York Army National Guard for 28 years, including two tours of duty in Iraq. He retired as a lieutenant colonel and now works as the director of procurement for a global health care organization and is the chairman of its veterans network.
Jack Eubanks signed up for the Marines while still in high school in Atlanta. He did three tours in Iraq and one in Afghanistan, and was seriously wounded three times. After a three-year recovery from brain trauma, he attended Vassar College, graduating with a degree in drama in 2016. He is pursuing a graduate degree in creative writing from the New School in New York.
Gregory Gadson is a retired colonel with a 26-year career in the United States Army. He served in the first gulf war, Bosnia, Iraq and Afghanistan. He remained on active duty after an I.E.D. explosion caused him to lose both legs above the knee and the full use of his right arm. He holds master’s degrees from Webster University and Georgetown and is an entrepreneur, speaker and accomplished photographer.
Joseph Geraci joined the Army in 1998 after graduating from West Point. He did three tours of duty in Afghanistan, including one as a company commander. He is the director of military relations at Teachers College, Columbia University, which conducts applied research to help veterans make the transition to civilian life. He is still an active-duty infantry battalion commander.
Jeff Hall works as an artist on the farm where he lives near Mooreland, Okla. He joined the Army in 1988 in the Field Artillery Branch and served for 23 years, retiring as a major. He had two tours in Iraq, from 2003 to 2004 and from 2005 to 2006.
Sheri Hall, wife of Jeff Hall, was a military spouse for 23 years. She and Jeff work for soldiers and veterans through the Real Warriors Campaign and provide sanctuary for veterans on their farm.
Zach Iscol is the executive director of the Headstrong project, a nonprofit provider of mental-health care for veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan. He served for seven years in the Marine Corps, including two tours of duty in Iraq.
Phil Klay is the author of “Redeployment,” a collection of short stories that won the 2014 National Book Award for fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award for best first book in any genre. He joined the Marine Corps in 2005 and served for four years, including a tour in Iraq.
Jenny Pacanowski joined the Army in 2003, serving a tour of duty in Iraq. As well as being a poet, performer and public speaker on veterans’ issues, she is the associate director of Impact Theater: The Veterans Project, which brings civilians and veterans together onstage, and the artistic liaison of the One Fight Foundation, which is dedicated to reducing suicide among veterans.
Rudy Reyes joined the Marines in 1998, serving three combat tours in Afghanistan and Iraq, and working as a counterterrorism contractor in Africa for the Department of Defense. He is an actor and a co-founder of Force Blue, a nonprofit that enables veterans to use their skills on environmental projects focusing on ocean conservation. He played himself in the 2008 HBO mini-series “Generation Kill.”
Loree Sutton is a retired Army brigadier general and the commissioner of the New York City Department of Veterans’ Services. She was commissioned for active duty in 1985, just after her graduation from medical school, and she served in Egypt and in Iraq during the first gulf war. She was promoted to brigadier general in 2007 and was the founding director of the Defense Centers of Excellence for Psychological Health and Traumatic Brain Injury.
Where to Get Help
The Department of Veterans Affairs maintains a hotline for veterans in crisis that operates 24 hours a day. Call 800-273-8255 and press 1. Online, go to veteranscrisisline.net/chat, or send a text message to 838255. You can also contact the Headstrong project, which provides cost-free support for veterans, at getheadstrong.org.
Bruce Headlam is a staff editor on the Op-Ed page of The Times.
AssessmentofDennisJohnson
In one of the rare interviews he did, the fiction writer and poet Denis Johnson — who died on Wednesday at 67 — was asked about his craft, and he quoted these lines from Joseph Conrad: “My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel — it is, before all, to make you see. That — and no more, and it is everything.”
In his own novels and poems, Mr. Johnson fulfilled that task with extraordinary savagery and precision. He used his startling gift for language to create word pictures as detailed and visionary, and as varied, as paintings by Edward Hopper and Hieronymus Bosch, capturing the lives of outsiders — the lost, the dispossessed, the damned — with empathy and unsparing candor. Whether set in the bars and motels of small-town America, or the streets of wartime Saigon, his stories depict people living on the edge, addicted to drugs or adrenaline or fantasy, reeling from the idiocies and exigencies of modern life, and longing for salvation.
There is a fierce, ecstatic quality to Mr. Johnson’s strongest work that lends his characters and their stories an epic, almost mythic dimension, in the best American tradition of Melville and Whitman. In the interlinked stories in “Jesus’ Son” (1992), the narrator traverses the United States, moving through a grim, fluorescent-lit landscape of rundown bars and one-night cheap motels, and meeting a succession of misfits as alienated and desperate as himself — people who often seem like crazy, drug-addled relatives of the lost souls in Sherwood Anderson’s “Winesburg, Ohio” or strung-out exiles from a Lou Reed album.
In “Fiskadoro” (1985), set in the near future after some sort of World War III-like disaster, an assortment of dreamers, con men and pirates inhabit an apocalyptic landscape in what used to be the Florida Keys, trying to hold on to fading memories of what the world used to be. And in “Tree of Smoke” (2007), which won the National Book Award, a young intelligence officer finds himself caught in the wilderness of mirrors that was the Vietnam War — a war, in Mr. Johnson’s telling, not so different from our recent, disastrous engagement in Iraq — where it’s increasingly difficult to distinguish between the well-intentioned and the mercenary, the honest and the duplicitous.
Mr. Johnson’s America, past or present, is uncannily resonant today. It’s a troubled land, staggering from wretched excess and aching losses, a country where dreams have often slipped into out-and-out delusions, and people hunger for deliverance, if only in the person of a half-baked messiah. Reason is in short supply here, and grifters and con men peddling conspiracy thinking and fake news abound; families are often fragmented or nonexistent; and primal, Darwinian urges have replaced the rule of law. And yet, and yet, amid the bewilderment and despair, there are lightning flashes of wonder and hope — glimpses of the possibility of redemption.
In “Tree of Smoke,” “The Stars at Noon” (1986) and “The Laughing Monsters” (2014), America seems to have exported some of its native-born madness — limning what Mr. Johnson saw as the country’s military or cultural colonization of large swaths of the globe. Poverty and chaos multiply abroad, where the sun and the heat fuel a sense that the center cannot hold, that things are indeed falling apart.
Mr. Johnson writes about those buses in Central America “that seem to drift out of history from Buchenwald and turn up in the third world to take impoverished people home.” And the “white sunshine” in the “hard land” of Africa, where traffic proceeds “African style, all honking, no braking.”
Plots in Mr. Johnson’s books tend to be tangled, melodramatic affairs — often highly indebted to famous works by Conrad, Graham Greene and Robert Stone — and in his lesser books, like “Already Dead: A California Gothic” (1997), his writing can devolve into portentous philosophizing, larded with New Age and Nietzschean intonations.
But in his masterworks — “Fiskadoro,” “Jesus’ Son,” “Tree of Smoke” and his harrowing debut novel, “Angels” (1983) — his incandescent language channels his characters’ desperation. Here, his prose possesses both the steel and the lyricism of his verse, and is perfectly attuned to capturing the surreal proceedings in Johnsonland, where hallucinatory imaginings bleed into daily life, where reality itself can seem like a fevered nightmare.
“What I write about,” Mr. Johnson once said, “is really the dilemma of living in a fallen world, and asking: ‘Why is it like this if there’s supposed to be a God?’”
Follow Michiko Kakutani on Twitter: @michikokakutani
DenisJohnson
Denis Johnson, a National Book Award winner whose novels and short stories about the fallen — junkies, down-and-out travelers, drifters and violent men in the United States and abroad — emerged in ecstatic, hallucinatory and sometimes minimalist prose, died on Wednesday at his home in Gualala, Calif. He was 67.
The cause was liver cancer, his literary agent Nicole Aragi said.
Mr. Johnson came to his down-on-their-luck characters through personal experience. He had published a book of poetry, “The Man Among the Seals,” at 19 and earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Iowa. But addictions to alcohol and drugs, including heroin, derailed him. He was in a psychiatric ward at 21, he said, and hospitalized again during the first of his three marriages.
Mr. Johnson initially believed that sobriety would damage his creativity, but later realized that his addictions were not fueling much writing.
“I finally figured it only meant I’d be writing three paragraphs less a year,” he told New York magazine in 2002, “because I’d only written two stories and 37 poems in almost a decade.”
That output would accelerate. By the early 1980s he was sober and had begun a prolific few decades, turning out novels, plays, poetry and journalism. In his 1983 novel, “Angels,” a character on death row sits strapped in a gas chamber listening almost rapturously to his heartbeat as he awaits the end.
“Boom … Boom! Was there ever anything as pretty as that one?” Mr. Johnson wrote. “Another coming … boom! Beautiful! They just don’t come any better than that. He was in the middle of taking the last breath of his life before he realized he was taking it.”
In 1992 he published “Jesus’ Son,” a collection of 11 short stories about petty crimes and murder across a desperate American landscape. Each is linked by the same drug-using narrator.
Mr. Johnson told The New York Times that his narrator — the sort of wild American who shoots people — is someone who would appeal to people in 12-step programs. “Jung once said that inside of every alcoholic,” he said, “there’s a seeker who got on the wrong track.”
Some critics have called “Jesus’ Son” Mr. Johnson’s masterpiece.
In The New Yorker, John Updike compared Mr. Johnson’s style to the “gleaming economy” of the young Ernest Hemingway. And in The Times, James McManus wrote that Mr. Johnson’s universe “is a place where attempts at salvation remain radically provisional and where a teetering narrative architecture uncannily expresses both Christlike and pathological traits of mind.”
The book was made into a film in 1999 directed by Alison Maclean and starring Billy Crudup as the narrator, described by the critic A. O. Scott in The Times as “like Candide strung out on every drug he can find.” Mr. Johnson had a small role in it.
Denis Hale Johnson was born on July 1, 1949, in Munich. His father, Alfred, worked for the United States Information Agency and was variously posted to Manila, Tokyo and Washington. His mother, the former Vera Louise Childress, was a homemaker.
Mr. Johnson, who studied under the minimalist writer Raymond Carver at the University of Iowa, counted Dr. Seuss, Dylan Thomas, Walt Whitman, T. S. Eliot and the guitar solos of Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix among his influences, primarily for poetry.
He was sensitive to the “language of people jammed together, like in the military and prisons,” he told the Santa Monica radio station KCRW’s “Bookworm” podcast.
“Those are pressure cookers of language,” he said. “They’re on the cutting edge.”
He wrote deliberately, taking many years to finish a story or a novel.
“My projects tend to develop over years, beginning with scattered notes; then I start puttering and tinkering with ideas, voices, descriptions, and then I progress to some serious fooling around,” he told Yale Literary Magazine in 2013. Then, he said, “in the latter stages I settle down and try to produce a couple of pages every day, with an occasional day off.”
His National Book Award came in 2007 for “Tree of Smoke,” a novel about Vietnam, espionage and military intelligence. The impetus for the book was, in part, his familiarity with diplomats, the military and C.I.A. employees through his father’s work.
While “Tree of Smoke” confirmed for some critics Mr. Johnson’s prodigious literary talent, others were not persuaded. B. R. Myers, writing in The Atlantic, said that “no book review can convey the tedium of reading bad prose in such unrelieved bulk.”
Mr. Johnson’s most recent novels include “Nobody Move” (2009), a crime tale set in the American West, and “The Laughing Monsters” (2014), a spy story that takes place in Africa.
Mr. Johnson is survived by his wife, the former Cindy Lee Nash; a daughter, Lana Burke; two sons, Morgan Johnson and Daniel Burke; a brother, Randall; and two grandchildren. His two previous marriages ended in divorce.
Mr. Johnson thought of himself as a Christian writer who wonders about the existence of God in a troubled world.
“I have a feeling God finds us pretty funny,” he told New York magazine. “But that’s all the speaking I should do for God — he doesn’t go around talking about me.”
Correction: May 26, 2017
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction: An earlier version of this article misstated one of the call letters of a Santa Monica radio station. The station is KCRW, not WCRW.
RichnessofVietnameseLanguage
Tưởng Năng Tiến
Courage sometimes skips a generation.
Chương mở đầu Hồi Ký Tống Văn Công có đoạn:
Ông nội tôi có ba người con, nhưng chỉ có cha tôi là trai. Sau khi cha tôi bị bắt vì tội “làm cộng sản”, ông nội tôi sốt ruột chuyện “nối giòng”. Có người mai mối má tôi là Nguyễn Thị Thâm ở làng Giồng Tre (xã An Ngãi Trung) cho cha tôi...
Sau lễ ra mắt, hai họ quyết định các bước kế tiếp theo tập tục. Cha tôi phải tới “ở rể” tại nhà ông bà ngoại tôi. Trong bữa cơm đầu tiên, ông ngoại tôi cầm chai rượu lên hỏi: “Con có biết uống rượu không”? Cha tôi đáp: “Dạ, có chút đỉnh”. Ông ngoại tôi rót đầy ly nhỏ, đưa cho cha tôi. Cha tôi cầm lấy, cám ơn và uống cạn. Ông ngoại tôi cười lớn nói bỗ bã: “Tao thích mày!”
Tui thì thích hết hai ông: ông ngoại và ông cha của nhà báo Tống Văn Công bởi cả hai đều vui tính, hảo rượu, và (chắc) đều là những trang hảo hớn. Bởi tui cũng sinh trưởng ở trong Nam nên nói như vậy (nghe) cũng kỳ kỳ, và e có điều tiếng eo sèo là mình hơi nhiều máu địa phương hay phân biệt vùng/miền.
Để tránh dị nghị, tôi xin mạn phép mượn đôi lời của một nhân vật khác – từ một vùng đất khác – ghi nhận về những nét “dễ thương” của nơi mà mình chôn rau cắt rún:
Về tính cách ham vui của người dân Nam Bộ, tôi có nhiều kỷ niệm đáng nhớ. Ở cùng phố với tôi, có anh bạn một hôm đến rủ tôi đến nhà anh ăn mừng sinh nhật Bác Hồ ngày 19-5. Đương nhiên là tôi đi. Đúng một tháng sau, anh lại đến rủ tôi đi liên hoan. Tôi hỏi, dịp gì thế? Anh ta bảo, hôm nay “đầy tháng” Bác Hồ!
Chưa hết, anh rủ tôi đến nhà ăn giỗ bà già. Đúng một tháng sau anh lại đến rủ tôi, nói: hôm nay giỗ bà già tôi! Nghe vậy tôi ngạc nhiên quá, vì vừa ăn giỗ tháng trước. Anh hiểu sự ngạc nhiên này nên giải thích ngay: năm nay nhuận hai tháng tám phải giỗ hai lần!
Vẫn chưa hết. Ngày Phật Đản, anh rủ tôi rồi đến ngày Noel mừng Thiên Chúa Giáng Sinh anh cũng đến mời tôi đi ăn mừng. Tôi thắc mắc vì anh theo đạo Phật cơ mà, anh cười, nói tôi đa tôn giáo! Thế nên hèn chi, ca dao Nam Bộ mới có câu:“Ra đường thấy vịt cũng lùa. Thấy duyên cũng kết, thấy chùa cũng tu!” (Lê Phú Khải. Lời Ai Điếu, Westminster, CA: Người Việt, 2016).
Theo T.S Nguyễn Văn Tuấn, tác giả cuốn hồi ký thượng dẫn sinh năm 1942 tại Hà Nội, học văn khoa tại trường ĐH Sư Phạm Hà Nội 1967, làm việc cho đài Tiếng Nói Việt Nam và sau này bị/được ‘lưu đày’vào Nam. Ông đã nghỉ hưu, nhưng vẫn còn viết cho truyền thông … lề trái.”
Dù ở hoàn cảnh “lưu đầy” nhưng Lê Phú Khải yêu qúi và rành rẽ Vùng Đồng Bằng Sông Cửu Long ít ai sánh kịp. Ngoài gần chục tác phẩm viết về miền đất này, ông còn tìm ra được hằng trăm từ kép mà người dân hai miền Nam/Bắc “chia nhau” (trước/sau hay sau/trước) một cách vô cùng độc đáo:
“... ô dù, ốm đau, buồn rầu, bơi lội, bóc lột, cố gắng, co kéo, chọc ghẹo, chán ngán, chặt đốn, cưng chiều, chén bát, chờ đợi, chửi rủa, chậm trễ, cần thiết, cạn kiệt, chia xớt, đưa rước, dạy bảo, dòmn ngó, dọn dẹp, dụ dỗ, đùa giỡn, đùi vế, đau ốm, đĩ điếm, khờ dại, điên khùng, dư thừa, giỡn chơi, đui mù, dòm ngó, dọa nạt, đe dọa, hư hỏng, hao tốn, hăm dọa, hối thúc, hù dọa, hung dữ, ham thích, hoảng sợ, hèn nhát ... Ví dụ như đui mù thì người Nam nói đui, người Bắc nói mù.”
Thiệt là bất ngờ và thú vị!
Hèn chi mà gíáo sư Nguyễn Văn Tuấn không tiếc lời ca ngợi: “Đây là một cuốn sách cần phải có trong tủ sách gia đình. Một cuốn sách bổ sung tuyệt vời cho các tác phẩm của Vũ Thư Hiên, Bùi Tín, Xuân Vũ, Dương Thu Hương, Trần Đĩnh, Huy Đức ...”
Tôi rất tán thành với nhận định (“một cuốn sách tuyệt vời”) và chỉ hơi lấy làm tiếc là đã không hoàn toàn chia sẻ được với nhà báo Lê Phú Khải về vài đoạn văn (ngăn ngắn) trong hồi ký của ông. Xin đơn cử một thí dụ:
“Đó là vào năm 1992, một đoàn nhà báo, gồm toàn những nhà báo có ‘máu mặt’, tổ chức lên Đà Lạt nhằm bênh vực chị Đặng Việt Nga, kiến trúc sư và anh Phương cũng kiến trúc sư, hai chủ nhân của ‘Ngôi nhà trăm mái’ đang bị địa phương bắt tháo dỡ vì nhiều lý do không chính đáng.
Đường xa, hết chuyện bàn, tôi nêu câu hỏi: Nếu bây giờ phải chọn hai gương mặt tiêu biểu cho Việt Nam thế kỷ qua thì các vị chọn ai? Mọi người đều chọn nhân vật số một là Hồ Chí Minh. Vậy còn người thứ hai? Cả xe im lặng. Có vị nói: Võ Nguyên Giáp! Tôi phản đối và đưa ra nhân vật thứ hai là Dương Thu Hương! Cả xe nhao nhao phản đối. Có người hỏi: Dương Thu Hương là cái quái gì mà ông lại cho là nhân vật thứ hai sau Hồ chí minh? Tôi trả lời: chẳng là cái quái gì mà tự cho mình có quyền đứng ngang hàng và dám vỗ vai nhắc nhở các vị đang cai trị dân chúng, thì đó là dân chủ, là xã hội công dân chứ còn gì nữa! Độc lập và dân chủ là hai phạm trù lớn nhất, được cả dân tộc nhắc đến nhiều nhất trong thế kỷ qua. Độc lập thì Hồ Chí Minh là hình tượng, còn dân chủ thì đến Đại Tướng cũng không dám đối thoại với tổng bí thư Lê Duẩn, Dương Thu Hương là thảo dân mà lại tự cho mình quyền ăn nói ngang hàng với các vị đang đứng trên đầu dân, thì đó là hình tượng của dân chủ. Sau hình tượng của dân tộc phải là hình tượng của dân chủ… Chẳng thấy ai trên xe nói gì nữa!”
Ảnh: photphet
Tôi không có mặt trong chuyến xe lên Đà Lạt vào năm 1992, và cũng không có khả năng tranh luận nên xin phép được mượn lời của nhà bình luận thời cuộc Vũ Quang Thuận và bác sĩ Phạm Hồng Sơn để góp ý thêm về ông Hồ Chí Minh – nhân vật mà theo nhà báo Lê Phú Khải là "một hình tượng độc lập tiêu biểu của nước Việt Nam" trong thế kỷ vừa qua.
Thằng đó nó khốn nạn lắm. Nó lừa dân mình. Dân mình ngu si không biết lại còn tung hô, dựng nó lên thành thánh.
Theo tôi, hiện nay nếu muốn đất nước có tiến bộ, có dân chủ thực sự hay thậm chí là chỉ muốn chính quyền phải cương quyết hơn với sự đe dọa, xâm lấn từ Trung Quốc thì chúng ta rất không nên lấy “cụ Hồ” ra làm tấm gương, trừ khi chúng ta không có đủ thông tin hoặc chỉ muốn có tiến bộ giả dối, nửa vời và chỉ muốn chính quyền vẫn lệ thuộc Trung Quốc. Chỉ cần xem lại một chút lịch sử chúng ta sẽ thấy điều này rất rõ.
Lãnh tụ nào và chính thể nào đã đưa vòng lệ thuộc, cống triều phương Bắc trở lại Việt Nam gần 80 năm sau khi sự phụ thuộc đó đã bị hủy bỏ hoàn toàn kể từ Hiệp ước Patenôtre 1884? Còn lãnh tụ nào và chính quyền nào nếu không phải là chính quyền Việt Nam Dân chủ Cộng hòa dưới sự lãnh đạo của Chủ tịch Hồ Chí Minh đã bắc những cây cầu “răng môi”, “núi liền núi sông liền sông” cho sự lệ thuộc, cống triều (kiểu mới) phương Bắc trở lại Việt Nam từ năm 1950?
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Ai là người vừa là Chủ tịch nước kiêm Chủ tịch đảng cầm quyền trong lúc ông Thủ tướng Phạm Văn Đồng hạ bút ký một công hàm công nhận lãnh hải Trung Quốc bao phủ cả hai quần đảo Hoàng Sa, Trường Sa?Chắc chắn 54 năm chưa phải là thời gian quá lâu để mọi người quên mất người đó là Hồ Chí Minh, Chủ tịch nước Việt Nam Dân chủ Cộng hòa (tại miền Bắc Việt Nam), kiêm chủ tịch Đảng Lao động Việt Nam và là một chí hữu, một “người thầy vĩ đại” đương thời của Thủ tướng Phạm Văn Đồng...
Cái đau xót và đau buồn chính là việc những người bị trị, những người đang mất tự do, bị áp bức, những người không muốn đi theo cái ác lại vẫn quì lạy, sùng kính một con người đã đưa họ từ những xiềng xích thô kệch, rỉ sét sang những gông xiềng êm ả, tinh vi, bền chắc hơn, đã khai sinh ra một chế độ suy đồi mà họ đang ta thán, đã là một ông trùm của các thủ đoạn dân chủ giả hiệu vẫn được duy trì cho tới hôm nay, đã là một chuyên gia về các kỹ thuật mị dân lão luyện tới mức khiến cho cả một dân tộc đa phần vẫn cứ an tâm, ngáo ngác, trông đợi tự do trong gông cùm và thờ kính chính kẻ đã quàng vào họ bộ gông cùm mới.
Tôi không hề có dụng ý mượn lời của Vũ Quang Thuận và Phạm Hồng Sơn để chỉ trích nhà báo Lê Phú Khải. Tôi chào đời trước hai nhân vật này, và sinh sau tác giả của cuốn hồi ký Lời Ai Điếu
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