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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 April 2015
In Vietnam-Perkasie: A Combat Marine Memoir, W. D. Ehrhart suggests the spiritual meaning of his Vietnam tour—the growing gulf between the ideals with which he had enlisted, and his actual combat experience—using the metaphor of a world exploding into pieces. He begins his Vietnam story with an incident that occurred virtually at the end of his tour, when he was nearly killed by a rocket grenade in Hue: “[S]uddenly the world was in pieces. I never heard the explosion. Only the impact registered.” By repeating these same words near the end of his memoir, Ehrhart frames his entire story within this metaphor of a world blown apart, with an impact that registers over the remainder of his life.
While the language with which he tells this story is quite straightforward and even prosaic, while his own lexicon does not include terms like “spiritual,” Ehrhart’s work is a chronicle of contemporary spiritual struggle. In our radically non-religious culture, fundamental spiritual questions and insights are often disguised in “secular” garb, and discovered—particularly by young people—only when worldly conventional wisdom is brought into question.
1. In his forward to the 1995 edition of this work, H. Bruce Franklin writes, “W.D. Ehrhart is gradually gaining recognition as one of the most distinguished poets to emerge from the Vietnam War, as the preeminent anthologist of Vietnam War poetry, and as the author of a series of autobiographical memoirs unsurpassed among veterans' prose writings in their potent combination of personal experience and historical understanding.” Franklin, H. Bruce, Vietnam-Perkasie at ix (U Massachusetts Press, 1995)Google Scholar.
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14. “Spiritual,” in my working definition, has to do with (one's understanding of and relation to) that fundamental power and meaning which, whether life-giving or destructive, is experienced as both a) at the center of the self and b) at the heart of reality.
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46. The term “primary” is used in a chronological, not qualitative, sense: it happens first. Secondary loss, while chronologically later, may well be greater, more significant, in its formative impact on the self.
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