Pratt has compiled a cross section of everything, from literature to music to poetry, to help explain the Vietnam War from start to finish. As the subtitle explains, this is from 1941-1982, so you get the French view as well as American, North and South Vietnamese mixed in. If you look on page 187 you will also even see a Swedish poem by Goran Sonnevi based on what he saw on television!

John Clark Pratt: Served 20 years as a pilot in the USAF flying over 3000 hours. He spent one year in Vietnam as a pilot and operations analyst in 1969-70, flying mainly T-28s with combat missions in nine different kinds of aircraft including T-28s and O-1s in Laos. He earned his doctorate in English literature from Princeton and taught at the Air Force Academy. He was instrumental in creating the Vietnam War Literature Collection at Morgan Library, a unique and world-renowned collection. In 1974 he retired from the USAF with an Air medal, Bronze Star, and Meritorious Service medal. In 1974 he published a nationally renowned novel, "The Laotian Fragments". His collage "Vietnam Voices," first published in 1984, then reissued by the University of Georgia Press in 1998. From 1974 to 1980 he chaired the English department at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, where he is now a professor of English. Dr. Pratt received the Colorado Seminars award in 1985 for Vietnam Voices; was a Pennock Distinguished Service Award and Honors Professor of the Year in 1989; the Excellence in the Arts Award in 1995 from the Vietnam Veterans of America; and the Golden Apple Award in 1995 from the Organization of Graduate Student Writers. He is one of the few American scholars awarded two Senior Fulbright lectureships to Portugal and the former Soviet Union. He’s written or edited 18 books and published 10 poems. Three of his poems appear in this anthology. Further biographical information is available at www.dcn.davis.ca.us/go/gizmo/j.html.





nytimes review charles trueheart
VIETNAM VOICES: Perspectives on the War Years 1941-1982. Edited by John Clark Pratt. (Viking, Cloth, $25. Penguin, Paper, $12.95.) These perspectives on America's immersion in Indochina are really a cacophony of voices, and it could not be otherwise. John Clark Pratt, a former Air Force lieutenant colonel who is now a professor of English at Colorado State University, has collected documents that suggest the war's reach and complexity - cables between Washington and Saigon; sections of Vietnam novels, from Graham Greene's ''The Quiet American'' to the outpouring of more recent fiction; successive, if not always consistent, statements of purpose by the National Security Council and Ho Chi Minh; touching letters (and tape recordings) sent home by American combat troops; excerpts from memoirs, press conferences, Presidential speeches and Congressional testimony; lots of poetry, much of it bad, all of it telling; accounts of antiwar demonstrations; official and unofficial reports of battles; some of the best journalism of the period, including Michael Herr's extraordinary work; graffiti from the G.I. underground. All of this is presented without comment, but ''Vietnam Voices'' does suggest the enormous scope of the material that must be reckoned with to appreciate what now seems a distant memory.