The lead essay under this heading, “The Chosen: Some Notes on Being a Veteran in America,” appears in Peace Not Terror: Leaders of the Antiwar Movement Speak Out Against U.S. Foreign Policy Post 9/11, Mary Susannah Robbins, ed. Also in this anthology are contributions by Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Dave Dellinger and Staughton Lynd, honored mentors to my generation of progressives, and essays by my contemporaries of the Vietnam generation, including my old comrade from Citizen Soldier Tod Ensign, and by members of the Iraq generation as well. A brief review of “The Chosen” from the Veterans For Peace national newsletter is appended to the end of the essay.
The second entry is not strictly speaking an essay, but its placement here is an attempt to distinguish between longer and shorter pieces of writing distributed throughout this site. I constructed “Diary of an Irish Missionary in Brazil” from a series of interviews conducted with Patrick Hughes over the winter of 1985/6. The resulting text is a first person narrative in which my own voice does not appear. In his introduction to the Diary, the Old Westbury Review’s editor made the following comments:
Sociologist Patrick Hughes . . . spent years in Brazil as a Catholic priest and came away with a wealth of political experience and a fascinating story to tell about the origins of liberation theology in the “base communities.” This is an interwoven story of a genuine interplay between personal and political development, and it comes as close as possible to a glimpse of how history actually happened.
The Chosen: Some Notes on Being a Veteran in America
Peace Not Terror 2007
Book Review by Will Shapira: Peace Not Terror
Diary of an Irish Missionary in Brazil: An Interview with
Patrick Hughes on the Origins of Liberation Theology
in Latin America — Old Westbury Review Fall 1986
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