BEYOND THE FENCE: Converging Memoirs
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I decided that since killing people could be arbitrarily seen as either heroic or murder after the fact, since the media decided which “massacres” were to be published and which were to be kept in the dark, since we lied about everything both to our soldiers and to our own public, since our allies could be wiped out by our own guns on the say-so of a kid only a month in country, since it was not OK for seventeen and eighteen year old boys stuck in a war to kill people who they had been told were the enemy, but it was standing orders that our own people were to be killed by our own MPs rather than allow them to be captured, since life and death could come down to drawing names out of a hat, and since we lost hundreds of people defending land we would then just abandon, I gave up on the war. I decided that, even after the onslaught of reality, I had some morals left from my upbringing.
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About the Book
There is a perversion of the American Dream that says greed is good, and that we should live, love, work, and advance inside the fences drawn by politics, religion, and laws. It is wrong. Through senseless inner-city death, the My Lai massacre, the taking of the Pueblo, a drug-addled return from Vietnam, and a trip across the United States with a Frisbee, the authors tell how The American Dream is still reachable, but you have to get out beyond the fences to find it. This book shows how two people did it.
About the Author
John T. Hourihan Jr., a retired journalist, has won state, regional and national awards for his opinion column in several New England newspapers. He received the Cross of Gallantry for valor in Vietnam, where he served nearly three years as a Vietnamese linguist. He is disabled now from the effects of Agent Orange. He lives with his author wife Lin Hourihan (The Virtue of Virtues) in the woods of central Massachusetts.
Amanda Eppley is a Swarthmore College graduate and holds a master’s degree from the University of California at Berkeley. She taught in inner city Oakland as a Teach for America corps member and in suburban Massachusetts where she coached soccer and co-founded the school’s GSA (Gay-Straight Alliance). Currently, she lives in Berkeley, California with her husband and their two sons, and she works for University of California, Berkeley’s Center for Cities + Schools as a Program Manager and Technology Specialist for the Y-PLAN, a social justice initiative that engages and empowers young people as critical actors in the process of community and educational transformation.