W.D. Ehrhart

More Fun Facts About American History

by

by W.D. Ehrhart Lately I’ve been ruminating on American history, in particular on how little most of my fellow citizens know about it. I recently wrote an essay in the Gazette (September 24, 2021) that took note of the missing stanza of our national anthem that condemns the British for offering freedom to American slaves, the missing stanzas of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” that criticize capitalism and the owner class, the overt anti-immigrant racism imbedded in American society, and a number of other fun facts most Americans are oblivious to. I wrote a whole essay (Gazette, October 8, 2021) about a Virginia …

Read more

Re-Thinking American History

by

by W.D. Ehrhart I have spent my entire life reading. As Emily Dickinson wrote, “There is no Frigate like a Book / To take us Lands away.” Even in Vietnam, as an 18-year-old, I read whatever I could get my hands on from John Updike’s Rabbit, Run to Voltaire’s Candide to John Cleland’s Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. I don’t read many books more than once because there are so many good books to read, but I’ve read multiple times David Howarth’s 1066: The Year of the Conquest, and Cecil Woodham-Smith’s The Reason Why: The Story of the Fatal Charge of the …

Read more

Sanitizing American History

by

by W.D. Ehrhart In September 1814, as Francis Scott Key stood on the deck of a British warship watching the bombardment of Fort McHenry, he was inspired to write a poem that eventually became the “Star-Spangled Banner.” We hear that song a lot these days: at every football game from middle school to the NFL; at NASCAR races and hockey games and commencement ceremonies, and, well, at just about any public event that attracts more than three Americans. I wonder how many of my fellow citizens know that Key’s original poem contains not just the stanza we sing, but three additional stanzas, one of which …

Read more

Afghanistan: Who’s Responsible?

by

by W.D. Ehrhart Surprise, surprise! Fox News and the Republican Party are blaming President Joe Biden for the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and the horrific scenes of terror and confusion at Kabul Airport in the final days. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy—born in 1965—calls the evacuation “the biggest U.S. failure in my lifetime” (Saigon fell in 1975. Well, I’m just sayin’.) Senators Josh Hawley and Marsha Blackburn are demanding that Uncle Joe resign. Endlessly mindlessly Talking Head Tucker Carlson called Biden “the supposed president of the United States.” Nevermind that Donald Trump brokered a treaty with the Taliban promising the withdrawal of U.S. troops …

Read more

Afghanistan: Vietnam Redux

by

by W.D. Ehrhart Way back in March and April of 1975, I watched with profound sadness but absolutely no surprise as the South Vietnamese army (ARVN)—with only a brief exception at a place called Xuan Loc—turned tail and retreated without a fight in the face of a North Vietnamese offensive, and the government the U.S. had installed, paid for, and supported for two decades collapsed like a house of cards. Eight years earlier, I had gone to Vietnam as an 18-year-old Marine believing that I would be defending the freedom-loving people of South Vietnam from the communist aggressors invading their country. I encountered, over and …

Read more

God, Guns, & Ginny

by

Well, of course it was righteous. Bear any burden, pay any price, what you could do for your country. Godless communists, after all. You may have been only seventeen, but you’d seen them already in Hungary, Cuba, Berlin. Something had to be done, and someone would have to do it. There is something about a thatched-roof hut in the middle of rice fields, burning, a mortally wounded woman softly keening, child dead in her arms, that can’t be blamed on Chairman Mao, Castro, Lenin, or Das Kapital. Heavy artillery flattened that home. Ours. Our guns did that. Long before I reached my thirteen months, I …

Read more