The Victory Tour

Next Thursday evening I’ll be the featured attraction at the Wisconsin Veteran’s Museum in Madison WI. One of the ways you can tell that you are getting really old is that history teachers bring you to class for “show and tell” and museums put you on display as an “event.”

I’ll be there to talk about my experiences as a fighter pilot during the Vietnam years, drawing upon stories from my first book, When Thunder Rolled, which was published in 2003 and my upcoming book tentatively titled, Phantom Flights, Bangkok Nights. Visit my web site at www.thunderchief.org for more details about the two books along with links to Amazon where you can check out what readers have had to say about the work.

The amazing thing about the various engagements I’ve had since the release of the first book is the number of places that were the most adamant in their opposition to America’s involvement in Southeast Asia which have extended invitations. The scenes of the most bitter protests against the war in general and the American military in particular have seemed to most eagerly embrace the memoirs and history of the individuals who were participants in the SEA War Games. Maybe it reflects a generational change in what it means to serve one’s country or maybe it simply is the tempering of bitterness over time. Regardless, the experience has been uniformly gratifying and the audiences have been sincerely interested in the history of the time while it can still be related by living participants.

Last November I spent successive days speaking first to history classes at the US Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs and then on campus at the University of Colorado in Boulder, often referred to as the intellectual capital of the “People’s Republic of Boulder.” It was, quite coincidentally on Veteran’s Day, and I will note that I did not encounter Pseudo-Professor Ward Churchill, although since the event preceded his fifteen minutes of fame, I could have bumped him in the hallways of the building. Suffice to say that the event was not protested as war-mongering, nor were there any effigies burnt in my honor.

I’ve done radio interviews for KSFO in San Francisco and Talk America out of Washington DC. I’ve been to the library in Columbus Ohio, just an hour or so down the road from Kent State University and, now I’m going to be a few blocks from some of the blood-stained draft protest sites in Madison where the AFROTC building was bombed by those pacifists who were willing to make exceptions to their peace-loving activities if it meant only patriotic fellow-students might be injured. About all that is left to fulfill the triumphal victory tour is an invitation to Berkeley California. Nah, I wouldn’t go.