Vietnam–Perkasie

In 1982, John Newman, curator of the Vietnam War Literature Collection at Colorado State University, said of W.D. Ehrhart: “As a poet and editor, Bill Ehrhart is clearly one of the major figures in Vietnam War literature.” This autobiographical account of the war, the author’s first extended prose work, demonstrates Ehrhart’s abilities as a writer of prose as well. Vietnam–Perkasie is grim, comical, disturbing, and accurate. The presentation is novelistic—truly, a “page-turner”—but the events are all real, the atmosphere intensely evocative.

Memoirist, poet, editor, and Marine veteran, W.D. Ehrhart taught English and history at the Haverford School in Haverford, Pennsylvania. The author of twenty books, his prose and poetry have appeared in hundreds of publications including the Los Angeles Times, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Utne Reader, Reader’s Digest, American Poetry Review and the Virginia Quarterly Review. He was a major presence in the Ken Burns and Lynn Novick documentary The Vietnam War.

W.D. Ehrhart
Format: softcover (6 x 9)
Pages: 328
Bibliographic Info:
Copyright Date: 1983
pISBN: 978-0-89950-076-8
eISBN: 978-0-7864-8757-8
Imprint: McFarland

Foreword (John Clark Pratt)      ix
Prologue      xi
The Memoir      1
Military History of W.D. Ehrhart      313
About the Author      315

• “As a poet and editor, Bill Ehrhart is clearly one of the major figures in Vietnam War literature”—John Newman, curator of the Vietnam War Literature Collection at Colorado State University;
• “one of the great poets and writers of nonfiction produced by the Vietnam War”—The Nation;
• “thoughtful and probing…a must”—Choice;
• “brutal, honest, funny and tragic”—Philadelphia Inquirer;
• “unrelenting, authentic…the most vivid exploration of a soldier’s conscience we’ve ever read…eloquent”—Samisdat;
• “a graphic portrait…gripping prose”—DAV Magazine;
• “I don’t think I’ve read another Vietnam narrative that presents a better picture of the participants, both Vietnamese and American, and their shared frustration as the war progressed”—John Clark Pratt, Lt. Col. USAF (ret.), author of The Laotian Fragments;
• “[Ehrhart] combines compassion, wit, and a poet’s eye for detail with the confessional charm of a bildungsroman: a profoundly moving, authentic work”—Natalie L.M. Petesch, author of Duncan’s Colony.