Editor position

Dear Mr. Robinson,

I am responding to your ad for an editor for a book on war and peace issues and am attaching my vitae for your review. For the past several years, I have researched and written on these issues. For writing samples, you may follow the links on my vitae. I am also attaching a recent poem, "Peace Meetings," now under consideration at a few magazines. I helped found a peace group at the local UU church -- you may see some of our work at www.uucharlottesville.org (please search under Social Action and Peace Action Committee). With input from many scholars and activists, I compiled a reading list as well as led several other projects, including aid to Iraqi refugees here in Charlottesville. For Averett University, I taught a Marine as he completed independent studies English courses while in the war zone in Iraq. He called me every week. My father is a Vietnam vet, and I grew up in a militay family. Now, I am a Quaker and a peace activist. I can provide more writing samples if you require them. I teach English part-time, raise small children, and write and publish poetry and essays. I am seeking more employment.

Thank you for your consideration.

[LOVING THE ESSAYS]

At the peace meetings, I found men, mostly old –

from WWII, Vietnam, the Korean War. Ken brings his projector

and runs the equipment. He recalls the year he married his first wife,

the same year he was radicalized, he says, when Nixon ordered

the invasion of Cambodia. James lost his job teaching English and history

when he opposed the Vietnam War. He read the Bible

by flashlight as a teenager and now tells me outlandish stories from it:

how in Deuteronomy, chapter 12, a couple of pages after the Ten Commandments

he found divine instructions for a man to devour all nations that the Lord your God

is giving over to you and if among the captured, you find a comely woman

to your liking, you may marry her – take her into your house, have her shave her head,

pare her nails, and discard the clothes she wore when captured;

let her mourn her parents for one month then you may have sex with her.

Also, my friend read histories of WWII, of how Roosevelt turned away Jews

from Nazi Germany, how we might’ve stopped Pearl Harbor.

Companies melted steel into planes and bombs,

birthing them like their favorite sons. I met Bernard, a WWII veteran

at a Hiroshima Nagasaki Remembrance event. In the downtown heat,

we studied placards with pictures of charred bodies, frozen in forever flame,

children with tumors swelling grotesque from their small bodies.

At the boots display for the dead Iraq War soldiers, I met Vietnam vets

whose stories reminded me of my father, chewed up by the same lies.

These Vietnam vets long ago risked names like “traitor,” sneers of contempt

as they broke the code of macho silence to tell what was much more

dangerous than the muscular myth. They are men who teach me, answer my questions,

whys and hows and what about that and this doesn’t make sense. What was the real story,

I ask, not the one Mr. Harper droned about in high school that I never listened to anyway,

not the one paid for by the government, but the real one, the story of the losers,

the conquered, the one about who wrote the check and who got paid?

Men who let me ask and send me articles and book titles. A willing daughter,

I have adopted them as fathers. I wept when I read in the Vietnam Vets against the War newsletter about how Vietnam vets guarded Iraq vets as they spoke

at the Winter Soldier Hearings about what they had seen, what they had done.

I wept because those elder men protected the younger when they told the truth,

they stood guard to absorb shouts and insults, were willing to take a bullet even,

if needed, in the chance that someone aimed to stop them from crushing the myths

with their simple words that afternoon. I, too, with simple words, crush myths.

Because they scare me with their gleam and roar, their curtain-whipping deception,

their blink and flash of abstract words, the spells they cast and how we follow them

out to the road’s edge, keep following them even as the boy in the VA hospital

with cuts all over his bald head from IEDs forgets his name but begs

to go back to fight, to help his friends, even as the bulldozers raze the home

of the howling children as they and their mother watch. Then we wonder

how it all happened. I love these men at this peace meeting, weary of myths

long out-used, nothing left to loose, men who have seen what it’s like,

who speak up and still try to figure out what to do before it’s too late.

Jim knows how close we are to destruction after fighting in Korea,

after his 38 years at the Pentagon, after his wife’s death from cancer.

His hands tremble with Parkinson’s. He lives with his daughter now

and gets mailings from the FCNL, the Quakers. I love the strength

of these men when there’s nothing left to do but watch a movie

about Gaza and the West Bank, talk and listen on a Sunday night.