Jean Stimmell

Sorrow, grief, and trouble sit like vultures on my psychic fence

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by Jean Stimmell A few years ago, I photographed five vultures attempting to warm up on a cold winter morning by spreading their wings toward the sun. I am using it to illustrate this rant. The title⁠1 reflects how I feel. I can’t get images of maimed and bloody bodies out of my mind, first in Ukraine and now doubling down in Israel and Palestine. They are broadcast nonstop on the news and haunt my dreams. Especially disturbing are the corpses of dead babies. As I write this, 4104 children have been killed so far, just in Gaza, according to the United Nations.⁠2 Seeing their …

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War: What Is It Good For?

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by Jean Stimmell In 2002, Vernon Klinkenborg, known for his odes to country living, wrote The Rural Life, assigning a chapter to each month of the year. In his November entry, he veers off subject, observing that World War I veterans “are impossibly old by now.” He appears to be making reference to what we now call Veterans Day, celebrated on November 11—but first observed in 1919 on the first anniversary of the armistice that ended World War I. Rather than dismissing these old-timers, Klinkenborg argues, we should bring them front and center to remind us of “the intractable knowledge that comes from a place …

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How Vietnam got under America’s callused cowboy skin

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by Jean Stimmell Because America chose to wage a war in Vietnam, Thich Nhat Hanh was exiled from his country and ended up a renowned spiritual teacher and peacemaker, instrumental in mellowing our macho culture. It was even more of a turnaround for Ocean Vuong, the acclaimed writer and poet: He tells us he literally wouldn’t exist without the Vietnam War. That’s because his grandfather, an American soldier fighting in Vietnam, met his grandmother, “a girl from the rice paddies,” ⁠1 and married her. And then, there’s me: a hapless 19-year-old who stumbled into Vietnam after dropping out of college. I enlisted before the big …

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One For All, And All For One

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by Jean Stimmell I was mesmerized by a scene I saw on TV at the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine: A group of neighbors with rifles guarding a suburban street leading into Kyiv against approaching tanks, their faces illuminated by fires they had lit in trashcans to keep warm, fearless and immovable, belting out in unison the Ukrainian National Anthem. When everything is on the line, we forget our differences and come together as one.  Of course, we do: as social animals, it has been bred into us. That’s why we have survived as a species. Although much less dire, I once was …

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Edited by Real Life

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by Jean Stimmell Last month I started a column contending that, emotionally speaking, events in the 1960s were as disjointed and perilous as the existential angst we face today. My mind had flashed back to those olden days as I cut kindling with my hatchet to start the first fire of the season with wood I had harvested off my land. The war in Vietnam War raged. Each day the news reported, like a sports score, how many of the enemy we had killed, as if that number justified the death of many of our brothers and sisters who also became cannon fodder that day. …

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Kurt Vonnegut’s Way Of Dealing With The Trauma

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by Jean Stimmell I was psyched to see “Unstuck in Time,” a new film about Kurt Vonnegut by Robert Weide and Don Argott. I had devoured Kurt’s most famous book, Slaughterhouse-Five, when it came out in 1969, soon after I got back from serving in Vietnam. As someone who viewed my war as unnecessary, illegal, and immoral, I could identify with his anti-war stance and how he questioned authority. Later, I became intrigued with him for being a wounded warrior, as were my patients, after working in the VA treating veterans suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). In  Slaughterhouse-Five, the narrator and Billy Pilgrim, …

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