“But can one say, I will not obey?” I walked in the dark past the starving children and naked women. “But can one say, I will not obey?” They cry out to me, I stare ahead, and walk past. “But can one say, I will not obey?” The streets are on fire, the people hide […]

It’s windy out tonight. The wind blows violently through the trees, through the closed windows, out through the closed chimney. The temperature is dropping rapidly. It was seventy degrees out this afternoon. It will be thirty in another hour. The heat still isn’t on here. Maybe it will clang to life later tonight as the […]

Fox News has a lot of critics. Their slogan “fair and balanced” is laughable floating over a waving American flag. Sometimes these critics of Fox News get on the channel, but when pressed for specific examples of right wing bias, they can’t come up with any. Maybe it’s subtle. I don’t think so. The mid-term […]

Jan 2007, Content I was dreaming about warm beaches and smiling women in bikinis when Jones shook me awake. “What? What?” I sat up and looked around. White walls shone even in the darkness of night. Hawaii faded like a soft mist. I looked to my right. Jones stared at me. “Herring?” “Yeah?” “Hey, man, […]

A professor offered an ethical dilemma to his class. Imagine that he comes into class, pulls out a pistol and shoots a student. Another student in the class has her own pistol packed away in her purse. The professor is getting ready to kill another student, is it ethical for this woman with the gun […]

The merciless Kentucky sun was beating the earth, wilting the trees, and silencing the birds. Pay slouched in a chair outside his room on the third floor balcony of the brick barracks with a sweating Bud-Light can drinking slowly. He stared out into the trees listening to his screaming mind. His oblong red face, broken […]

We arrived at Fort McClellan at eleven pm. The driver of our Alabama “Limo” van had flirted shamelessly with a girl from New York or Florida the whole two hour drive from the Atlanta airport. He told her stories about the Army, about what basic training would be like. He didn’t know shit. The ten […]

Tim O’Brien had everything going for him in the summer of 1968. He had just graduated from college and was preparing to attend graduate school in the fall. But the American war in Vietnam was heating up and Gen. Westmoreland, commander of U.S. forces, requested 200,000 additional troops in the aftermath of the Tet Offensive. […]

Johnny got his gun, yes he did. A rich white man wrapped in the flag told him get your gun and defend this land. He used hollow words like freedom, duty, honor, baseball and apple pie while dreaming of no-bid contracts and steak dinners and cocktails and hookers in Washington. Johnny got his gun. The […]

Water walls and solid air. I ran into my childhood room, climbed under the bed filled with squirming maggots, tried to hold my breath. I couldn’t move. I was in a room. Blinding light shining through large windows. A long wooden floor and shiny mirror walls. Someone started throwing stuff at me. I jumped through […]