Description
Book SynopsisIn this book, an anthropologist sets his experiences as a teenager fighting in the Vietnam War within the larger sweep of American culture and society. When his daughter is born decades after he returned from war the violence of those experiences, long suppressed, emerges from the shadows.
Trade ReviewWhen Sailors gather together to share sea stories, we start with “this is no shit” and tell a whopper of a tale—the most harrowing, the most hilarious, the most absurd experience of our service. Each old tale that is retold, however, is accompanied by the nervous grin, the wink, the subtle nod, the shudder, or the raised hairs on the back of your neck that accompanies memories of the everyday dangers we endured for months on end. These are the tales we do not often tell but are necessary to understanding the experiences of serving in the military. War and the Arc of Human Experience is more than a sea story. It is a detailed exploration of these everyday dangers. More importantly, it is a personal journey through one Sailor’s confrontation with the layering of these war-time experiences and their impact throughout his life after the service. His work is illuminating and provocative for veterans, and instructive to those who live and work with all who served in both peace and war.
-- Matthew "TUT" Testerman, United States Naval Academy
Rarely does an author demonstrate the fortitude, determination, and curiosity to go where Glenn Petersen takes us in War and the Arc of Human Experience. From escaping a toxic family environment to joining the Navy where, as a young sailor, he was responsible for hundreds of lives in unfathomably dangerous circumstances, Petersen, like so many others, brought back from Vietnam the enduring aftershock of war.
As a veteran with PTSD and a renowned anthropologist, Professor Petersen courageously explores his personal experience in the context of its cultural and historical moment. Petersen’s passion, his gift to readers, is to put everything on the line in sharing his story.
-- Glenn Albright, Baruch College, CUNY
A beautifully written examination of what is carried home from war, the complexities of notions of healing and reconciliation, and establishing a life in anthropology while processing these formative traumas and working towards moments of reconciliation. War and the Arc of Human Experience dives deep into the culture and times that sent Glenn Petersen and a generation to fight in Vietnam, and the legacies of pain that emerged, even as he wrestles with these formative experiences that marked survivors in ways both negative and positive. A powerful work that will be widely read.
-- David Price, St. Martin’s University
Though set in the Vietnam War, this could be a memoir of all wars. Petersen gives us a gripping introspective work of military psychology that captures what is real about war and the path that leads each of us to it. Reading about him running away from a difficult father straight to Vietnam, then to academia, fatherhood, sobriety, fraught relationships, and treatment, helped me understand myself better and will make the reader understand us a bit better too.
-- Mark Zelcer, Queensborough Community College
Petersen combines autobiography with historical anthropology to puncture the reigning understanding of the Vietnam War in the United States. His deeply moving account both humanizes the history of the war and deepens our understanding of how entrenched narratives of masculinity and class draw young men to sign up for battle and shape our historical memory of the wars they fight.
-- Gus Carbonella, Memorial University of Newfoundland
Table of ContentsList of Figures
Introduction
Chapter One Why We Fight
Chapter TwoBecoming a Warrior
Chapter ThreeEveryday Danger
Chapter FourStress and Decompression
Chapter FiveThinking I’ve Left War
Chapter SixDaddy, Daddy, Daddy!
Chapter SevenWar and the Arc of Human Experience
Chapter EightEveryday War
Chapter NineWhy We Fought
AppendixSERE, Torture, Psychologists, and the CIA
Glossary
References
Index
About the Author
