Be My Baby

Like anyone I guess I get frustrated when I realize I've been pulled into a YouTube Shorts rabbit-hole, but this one just popped up and it's a little different for me. It's Bill Ehrhart, in footage that I believe also showed up in Ken Burns Vietnam doc. Ehrhart wrote Vietnam Perkasie, which longtime Xmastime buddy Serge used as the basis for one of Marah's best songs, Round Eye Blues. It's easily the single-most frank, bare and honest book I've read about the war; while most memoirs speak of "honor and duty", Ehrhart laid out bare what the soldiers in the thick of it really thought, ie just fucking surviving and getting to live the life they'd been born to barely 20 years earlier. It was brilliantly raw & honest, and I think anyone who reads it is slightly better for it. Particularly young men who are fed the fantasy of the great lie, Dulce et Decorum Est.