War & Peace
I grew up idealizing my grandfather’s service in World War I and my father’s in World War II. But as I came of age during the tail end of the American war in Vietnam, I considered myself lucky to have drawn a high draft lottery number—284—in a year when the number of draftees was dropping, but young men were still returning home in coffins.
I never fought in a war, nor did I serve in the military, but I have retained a simultaneous fascination and abhorrence with men’s experiences with guns, the military and war. I plumbed the emotional contours of my ambivalences about manhood, guns and warfare in a 2011 memoir, King of the Wild Suburb. In my 2019 book Guys Like Me: Five Wars, Five Veterans for Peace, I use life history interviews and participant observation to illuminate the experiences, lives and words of five men who fought in five different wars, and who subsequently became lifelong advocates for peace. And my 2021 book, Unconventional Combat: Intersectional Action in the Veterans’ Peace Movement, examines a younger cohort of military veterans—mostly women of color and queer-identified vets—who are contesting for leadership in veterans’ activist work for peace and social justice.