Milspeak Books: 15 books

In 1993, two Vietnam veterans got together over coffee and founded The Memorial Day Writers' Project (MDWP), a creative vehicle and venue for veterans and others who have been touched by war. The MDWP sets up a tent within sight of the Vietnam Memorial (The Wall), rain or shine, every Memorial...

War Stories, a collection of short stories written by veterans, touches upon every aspect of military life from hard combat to losing a comrade, to making love after being blown up by a mortar to honoring the war dead to remembering the Indian Wars, WWII, lost loves, and surrender to a medical system...

This collection of true stories is a great volume (for the living room or the class room) to get the conversation started about the wartime experience and military life. What are our troops and their families really enduring to answer the call to duty? Revisit the Korean War and Vietnam War on your way to the Gulf Wars as you learn about military life in the words of those who live it.

HOW TO NOT TELL A WAR STORY is a collection of short stories about veterans who went to war but left without a war story to tell. Forty years after their experience, these veterans begin asking if there is something more to say about their military service. Among other things, they come to appreciate...

What if your country started a war and when you answered the call to duty you discovered that not all of your enemies wore a uniform different from your own? What if your knowledge of enemies-among-friendlies increased ten thousand-fold the basic insanity already instilled by diametrically opposed...

Reading the 45 pieces of Korean Echoes draws the reader into piecing together a puzzle, each piece a small measure of the Korean War soldier's world, a world wholly embedded in the deepest design at the heart of human experience, embedded as if words were shrapnel, steel moments of clarity rendered...

In BROTHER DIONYSUS, veteran Sean Brendan-Brown explores military life and its aftermath through characters as strangely wrought as those peopling Sherwood Anderson’s fiction and as real as those portrayed in Raymond Barthes’ collection of cultural essays, Mythologies. Brendan-Brown’s characters...

Reader Review by Jill Lapin-Zell Sometimes you read something that affects you very deeply at a time when it otherwise wouldn’t. Sometimes you read something that tugs at your heart as if it were wrapped in chains pulled by an 18-wheeler. Dick Reynolds’ “Averil, My Anchor” is such a...

Composed of riffs on the forms of haiku (extended haiku), memoir (micro memoir) and photography (photosculpture), this electronic book is composed of 51 panels grouped in sets of three as 17 triptychs. To form each triptych, these folding-in-upon-center panels are arranged as two tablets of writing...

Not since Breece D'JPancake has a writer the likes of Danny Johnson emerged from the South with all the glory and hell of life attached and intact in his fiction. Add a measure of Tim O'Brien's stylization of military life and you still have only a glimmer of the storytelling you'll love in the Harry and Bo collection.

The 21 short stories crafted by Tom Sheehan in THE WESTERING tell of the pioneering of those who came from many countries, many customs, many cultures, and brought much of that mix with them to create the American West as we now know it. Their pursuits, their dreams, and the harsh life they entered...

As the sun begins to set on the Soviet Union, desperation slowly grips this once great empire's staunchest champions. This is the story of the courageous few who fight to hold off that final sunset, and of the American counter-intelligence operatives who bring the Cold War to end game.When a country calls, some give all....

In his third espionage thriller, author Dick Reynolds packs the pages with world travel, love, murder and the surreal life of unwilling spy Sandy Gilmartin. A momentary encounter with a Norwegian beauty sends Sandy, engineer and reluctant spy, on a journey from the groves of Orange County, California...

WEAPONS OF CAIN, a memory-vision of Vietnam, is the spellbinding story of Lieutenant Joseph Tompsen, whose tour of duty in Vietnam introduces him to street-wise villagers who become his family and to military cohorts who become his antagonists. As he faces life on death’s terms, one shattering moment...