Author : David A. Gerber
Publisher : University of Michigan Press
Page : 364 pages
File Size : 46,99 MB
Release : 2000
Category : History
ISBN : 9780472110339
Examines the injuries of military service across time and Western cultures
Author : David Davis
Publisher : Center Street
Page : 374 pages
File Size : 18,39 MB
Release : 2020-08-25
Category : History
ISBN : 1546084622
Out of the carnage of World War II comes an unforgettable tale about defying the odds and finding hope in the most harrowing of circumstances. Wheels of Courage tells the stirring story of the soldiers, sailors, and marines who were paralyzed on the battlefield during World War II-at the Battle of the Bulge, on the island of Okinawa, inside Japanese POW camps-only to return to a world unused to dealing with their traumatic injuries. Doctors considered paraplegics to be "dead-enders" and "no-hopers," with the life expectancy of about a year. Societal stigma was so ingrained that playing sports was considered out-of-bounds for so-called "crippled bodies." But servicemen like Johnny Winterholler, a standout athlete from Wyoming before he was captured on Corregidor, and Stan Den Adel, shot in the back just days before the peace treaty ending the war was signed, refused to waste away in their hospital beds. Thanks to medical advances and the dedication of innovative physicians and rehabilitation coaches, they asserted their right to a life without limitations. The paralyzed veterans formed the first wheelchair basketball teams, and soon the Rolling Devils, the Flying Wheels, and the Gizz Kids were barnstorming the nation and filling arenas with cheering, incredulous fans. The wounded-warriors-turned-playmakers were joined by their British counterparts, led by the indomitable Dr. Ludwig Guttmann. Together, they triggered the birth of the Paralympic Games and opened the gymnasium doors to those with other disabilities, including survivors of the polio epidemic in the 1950s.Much as Jackie Robinson's breakthrough into the major leagues served as an opening salvo in the civil rights movement, these athletes helped jump-start a global movement about human adaptability. Their unlikely heroics on the court showed the world that it is ability, not disability, that matters most. Off the court, their push for equal rights led to dramatic changes in how civilized societies treat individuals with disabilities: from kneeling buses and curb cutouts to the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. Their saga is yet another lasting legacy of the Greatest Generation, one that has been long overlooked. Drawing on the veterans' own words, stories, and memories about this pioneering era, David Davis has crafted a narrative of survival, resilience, and triumph for sports fans and athletes, history buffs and military veterans, and people with and without disabilities.
Author : Miguel Reece
Publisher : CreateSpace
Page : 238 pages
File Size : 23,20 MB
Release : 2014-04-23
Category : History
ISBN : 9781499205732
Our American Heroes: The Stories behind the Fight for Freedom and DemocracyThis book is not about the author.This book is not about the battle.This book is about military members who are now veterans. Their memories are about some of the most legendary battles as well as their own private struggles. The recollections of these veterans cover an array of experiences around the world—one of the first female pilots in the U.S. Army Air Corps; a survivor of the Bataan Death March; POWs from WWII and Korea; an Ohio National Guardsman at Kent State; survivors, fighters, and patriots from Pearl Harbor, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Their families share their heroic stories of service to the world's freedom, as well as their frustration and disappointment with the VA bureaucracy or lack of information-sharing practices about their entitled benefits.The efforts of caregivers in enabling their veterans to have the best quality of life possible—spouses, mothers, children, guardians/fiduciaries, healthcare professionals, and the grandmother who had both her son and granddaughter deployed—speak volumes of their commitment and unconditional sacrifices. This collection of their stories is the author's continued privilege of serving the veterans who have enabled this great nation to stand guard in the world and assure the right to be free. Read on with respect and compassion.
Author : Deborah L. Grassman
Publisher : Vandmere Press
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 13,26 MB
Release : 2009-08-31
Category : Palliative treatment
ISBN : 9780918339720
For her two-plus decades as a hospice nurse at the Department of Veterans Affairs, Deborah Grassman has often heard the comment, Isn t your work depressing? Like many others, she had begun her hospice career with that same prejudice. She feared death itself, and because of that fear, she was unaware that she could find peace, joy, and fulfillment in caring for people at the end of their lives. She had no special training in caring for veterans, and she had no reason to think that veterans needs were any different from nonveterans. With time and experience, however, she began to realize that these veterans had experiences and training that made them different from other hospice patients. Likewise she began to understand that she could learn lessons about peace from people who were trained for war; that warriors often have wisdom that, paradoxically, shows us how to live in peace with each other and within ourselves. In Peace at Last, Deborah Grassman takes the reader on a journey of understanding and growth. While caring for thousands of veterans in a hospice setting over a 25-year career in a VA hospital, she gathered the veterans stories of pain and redemption, personal awakening, and peace. Then she crafted these stories into an unforgettable book. Designed to help caregivers, family members, and veterans themselves understand the impact of war and military culture on lives and emotions, Peace at Last contains veterans stories, hospice experiences, and a series of appendices providing sample materials that can assist with healing.
Author : Lee K. Pennington
Publisher : Cornell University Press
Page : 478 pages
File Size : 38,3 MB
Release : 2015-05-06
Category : History
ISBN : 0801455618
Thousands of wounded servicemen returned to Japan following the escalation of Japanese military aggression in China in July 1937. Tens of thousands would return home after Japan widened its war effort in 1939. In Casualties of History, Lee K. Pennington relates for the first time in English the experiences of Japanese wounded soldiers and disabled veterans of Japan's "long" Second World War (from 1937 to 1945). He maps the terrain of Japanese military medicine and social welfare practices and establishes the similarities and differences that existed between Japanese and Western physical, occupational, and spiritual rehabilitation programs for war-wounded servicemen, notably amputees. To exemplify the experience of these wounded soldiers, Pennington draws on the memoir of a Japanese soldier who describes in gripping detail his medical evacuation from a casualty clearing station on the front lines and his medical convalescence at a military hospital. Moving from the hospital to the home front, Pennington documents the prominent roles adopted by disabled veterans in mobilization campaigns designed to rally popular support for the war effort. Following Japan’s defeat in August 1945, U.S. Occupation forces dismantled the social welfare services designed specifically for disabled military personnel, which brought profound consequences for veterans and their dependents. Using a wide array of written and visual historical sources, Pennington tells a tale that until now has been neglected by English-language scholarship on Japanese society. He gives us a uniquely Japanese version of the all-too-familiar story of soldiers who return home to find their lives (and bodies) remade by combat.
Author : Deborah Cohen
Publisher : Univ of California Press
Page : 298 pages
File Size : 33,13 MB
Release : 2001-10-30
Category : History
ISBN : 0520220080
"Based on a breathtaking range of research in British and German archives, The War Come Home is written in an engaging, immediately accessible style and filled with rich anecdotes that are excellently told. This impressive book offers a powerful set of insights into the lasting effects of the First World War and the different ways in which belligerent states came to terms with the war's consequences."—Robert Moeller, author of War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany "With verve, compassion, and above all else, clarity, The War Come Home makes the dismal story of the failed reconstructions of disabled veterans in interwar Britain and German into engaging and provocative reading. Cohen moves from astute analysis of the interventions of high level bureaucrats to sensitive interpretations of how disabled veterans wrote and talked about their lives and the treatment they received at the hands of public and private agencies. She beautifully interweaves histories from below and above, showing how the two shaped -- but also collided with -- one another in profoundly consequential ways for the history of the 20th century."—Seth Koven, coeditor (with Sonya Michel) of Mothers of a New World: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States
Author : Karl Marlantes
Publisher : Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Page : 616 pages
File Size : 43,56 MB
Release : 2010-04-01
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 0802197167
Intense, powerful, and compelling, Matterhorn is an epic war novel in the tradition of Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead and James Jones’s The Thin Red Line. It is the timeless story of a young Marine lieutenant, Waino Mellas, and his comrades in Bravo Company, who are dropped into the mountain jungle of Vietnam as boys and forced to fight their way into manhood. Standing in their way are not merely the North Vietnamese but also monsoon rain and mud, leeches and tigers, disease and malnutrition. Almost as daunting, it turns out, are the obstacles they discover between each other: racial tension, competing ambitions, and duplicitous superior officers. But when the company finds itself surrounded and outnumbered by a massive enemy regiment, the Marines are thrust into the raw and all-consuming terror of combat. The experience will change them forever. Written by a highly decorated Marine veteran over the course of thirty years, Matterhorn is a spellbinding and unforgettable novel that brings to life an entire world—both its horrors and its thrills—and seems destined to become a classic of combat literature.
Author : Daniel P. Bolger
Publisher : Da Capo Press
Page : 393 pages
File Size : 37,81 MB
Release : 2017-11-07
Category : History
ISBN : 0306903245
Two brothers -- Chuck and Tom Hagel -- who went to war in Vietnam, fought in the same unit, and saved each other's life. They disagreed about the war, but they fought it together. 1968. America was divided. Flag-draped caskets came home by the thousands. Riots ravaged our cities. Assassins shot our political leaders. Black fought white, young fought old, fathers fought sons. And it was the year that two brothers from Nebraska went to war. In Vietnam, Chuck and Tom Hagel served side by side in the same rifle platoon. Together they fought in the Mekong Delta, battled snipers in Saigon, chased the enemy through the jungle, and each saved the other's life under fire. But when their one-year tour was over, these two brothers came home side-by-side but no longer in step -- one supporting the war, the other hating it. Former Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel and his brother Tom epitomized the best, and withstood the worst, of the most tumultuous, shocking, and consequential year in the last half-century. Following the brothers' paths from the prairie heartland through a war on the far side of the world and back to a divided America, Our Year of War tells the story of two brothers at war -- a gritty, poignant, and resonant story of a family and a nation divided yet still united.
Author : Gary Kulik
Publisher : Potomac Books, Inc.
Page : 507 pages
File Size : 23,99 MB
Release : 2009-10-31
Category : History
ISBN : 1597976377
War stories are mostly innocent fables and understood as such by both the teller and the hearer. However, they have long been used for political and national purposes, and those about the war in Vietnam were no exception, as painfully evidenced in the 2004 presidential campaign. John Kerry campaigned as a war hero. His opponents cast him as a liar and a traitor and their war story prevailed. ""War Stories"" delves into the myths associated with the Vietnam veteran s experience and looks at them through the war stories they told and continue to tell. Kulik conducts an extremely thorough review of the Vietnam literature and interviews participants wherever possible, poking holes in the war myths of people throughout the political spectrum. War Stories discusses how returning Vietnam vets were treated and delves into the myths that atrocities were commonplace, that all veterans of that war suffer from PTSD, and that all are guilt ridden. Kulik s research and analysis of such stories lies at the heart of this book s originality and provides a new perspective on the Vietnam War for scholars, students, and general readers. His purpose in exposing such stories is not to deny or minimize American war crimes in Vietnam but to cut through the cant of false stories so that we retain our outrage at those that are true. As we are faced with future war stories from Iraq and Afghanistan and their likely exploitation, the moral stance and the lessons learned in this book will be especially important."
Author : Donna A. Lowery
Publisher : AuthorHouse
Page : 636 pages
File Size : 48,49 MB
Release : 2015-09-24
Category : History
ISBN : 1504913981
Women Vietnam Veterans: Our Untold Stories, by Donna Lowery, a Vietnam veteran, chronicles the participation of American military women during the Vietnam War. This little-known group of an estimated 1,000 women from the Army, Marine Corps, Navy and Air Force left its mark in Vietnam from 1962 to 1973. They served in a myriad of duties from intelligence analysts, flight controllers, clerk-typists, translators, physical therapists, dietitians and communications specialists among many others. Our Untold Stories allows the women to speak for themselves about their experiences, and, for the first time ever, brings names, facts and figures together in one literary work. The purpose of the book is to be historically significant to future researchers. The history of the military women in Vietnam began in 1962 with Army Major Anne Marie Doering. She was born in what became North Vietnam. Her father was a French officer, her mother a German citizen. When her father died, her mother married an American businessman. Her service in Vietnam as a Combat Intelligence Officer is a compelling story of the US military women in a war zone. It was not until 1965 that the US Women’s Army Corps (WAC) sent two women as advisors to assist the newly formed Vietnam Women’s Armed Forces Corps. The following year, the Army authorized the establishment of a WAC Detachment in Vietnam. Soon, thereafter, the Air Force, Marine Corps and Navy also sent women to serve in various capacities. In March 1973, under the Paris Peace Accords, the last women left Vietnam along with the remaining men. The impact they had in Vietnam set the stage for the expansion and integration of women into additional roles in the military. Today, women serve in areas of active combat, demonstrating their abilities and dedication to the mission.
