A tribute to the American Indian who make excellent warriors in times of war.

http://groups.msn.com/TennesseeIndianAffai...ointofview.msnw

Native Americans have one of the highest record of service in the Vietnam era conflict, per capita, of any ethnic group. A majority of these men enlisted, and a disproportional number served in combat positions: in infantry regiments, tank battalions, airborne and airmobile units, and artillery batteries.

At first glance, these statistics might seem surprising. After all, historically, the U.S. military took Native land by force, and wiped out a generation of Indian warriors. Paradoxically, however, the recruitment of Native Americans had been as much a federal policy as Indian removal. Indians were recruited to fight with American forces against the British and the French. Native American served in the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812, and were recruited by both sides in the Civil War.

A much more powerful and persistant reason for the record of service, is that, in fact, many Indian veterans think of their modern warfare experience in terms of much older traditions. For many tribes, war was equally a physical and spiritual experience. Warriors were ritually prepared for, and ceremonially returned from the battlefield. Young men desired to have their strength, courage, and honor tested in war.

But Vietnam was a very different kind of conflict. The perennial problem of finding and fixing enemy positions was a complicated and almost impossible task. There was no simple distinction between civilian and combatant. And the use of mines, foot-traps, and other distance devices put the enemy nowhere and everywhere. It made any manoever extremely dangerous. Last, but not least, the political divisions at home caused uncertainty and anger.

In some ways the experience of Native Americans is very similar to other Vietnam veterans, and in other ways, very different. What follows are excerpts from the documentary, WARRIORS. Each person we interviewed is represented here in their own words, as they share different aspects of their war-time experience.

Healing, on many levels is so important.

xlent post

http://www.hanksville.org/storytellers/redeagle/Womac.html

Craig Womac

Red Earth : Two Novellas, Philip H. Red Eagle.

Philip Red Eagle's book Red Earth is a novella about Native soldiers in Vietnam who travel through time and through a series of inter-connected events, each character emerging, in some cases, in Vietnam and, at other points, back home in many instances with foreknowledge of a future which they have already lived. Red Eagle's technique of moving characters in time is so complex that it is a little hard to explain outside the stories themselves. They are not Dickensian observers, mere ghosts of experiences past, nor are they cliched time travelers sent back to fix things. The best word I can think of in terms of their relationship to the past is "interactive." Other authors have explored re-lived Vietnam experience, the warrior who returns physically but not spiritually, the trauma of Vietnam re-asserting itself in civilian life so that pre- and post-Vietnam do not exist. Red Eagle radicalizes this treatment, however, in a manner consistent with a Dakota worldview. The idea of extended kinship, the inter-connectedness of all things, is so pervasive in Red Eagle's novel that linear cause and effect is completely disrupted. In the novel, this extended kinship centers around the fact that the "real world" of post-Vietnam experience profoundly overlaps other worlds, other beings.

An example of the disruption of cause and effect occurs in one early scene in the novel when Raymond Crow-Belt withholds a "Dear John" letter from a soldier by the name of Martinez, who, in "ordinary time," has already received the letter. This kind of time interruption - time as points of light in three-dimensional space rather than marks along a time line - makes sense in light of war experience. As Tim O'Brien says in his well-known essay "How to Tell a True War Story":

In any war story, but especially a true one, it's difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen. What seems to happen becomes its own happening and has to be told that way. The angles of vision are skewed. When a booby trap explodes, you close your eyes and duck and look outside yourself. When a guy dies, like Lemon, you look away and then look back for a moment and then look away again. The pictures get jumbled; you tend to miss a lot. And then afterward, when you go to tell about it, there is always that surreal seemingness, which makes the story seem untrue, but which in fact represents the hard and exact truth as it seemed. War stories continue to unfold long after the war ends, revised by life after battle, oftentimes resisting easy meaning.

Red Eagle's approach of placing the Vietnam story inside a much broader view of what constitutes time takes into account this tendency of war to be refracted through constantly changing angles of vision. Most amazingly, through visionary experience, Red Eagle's characters physically return to Vietnam, years after they have come home, a journey, on the one hand, incomprehensible (why would anyone want to go back?), and, on the other, fascinating (the warrior with a sense of retrospection reexamining his experience in the actual environment it took place in rather than stateside reflection). A less capable author might have made these characters return to Vietnam for the purpose of intervening in history and thwarting disaster - ambushed patrols forewarned, and so on. This book avoids the easy route and sends the characters back to South Asia on more complicated spiritual patrols, making them look at both Vietnam and life afterwards differently.