I'm taking a little detour from my typical post tonight in order to publish this moving poem by a talented and eloquent writer. David Plumb's work is shaped by his own experience as a naval officer during the Vietnam War and by his profound empathy for those whose names are "whispered in the stars. Jessica, Daniel, Jeffrey, Patrick" -- names that "echo in blood, in guns, in storms."
Thank you, David, for reminding us who they are, and who we are as well.
An amazing book I read recently was Worshipping the Myths of World War II, written by Edward Wood, a combat veteran of World War II. Wood was an 18-year-old thrown into battle in France after D-Day in June of 1944 with virtually no military training.
In researching my book 
In 2005 I produced a documentary film, 
In the summer of 1973, I was the director of the Selma Inter-religious Project in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. The Selma Project was a support organization for civil rights activists working in small towns located in the rural Black Belt across central and southern Alabama, southern Mississippi, and the Florida panhandle. Most of our board members were black Baptist preachers, and I was a skinny 23-year-old white kid in charge of running the project and raising money. 
