[Dear
Reader: The time is at last at hand to turn full-time to writing the
memoir. To facilitate the writing, the blog continues to post, but now monthly
on the 1st Wednesday of each month. We will keep you informed about our
progress to publication.]
Two
generations of Sharlets, Bob and Jeff, recently participated in a remote
interview with long-time activist Thorne Dreyer of The Rag Blog and Rag Radio, cutting edge alternative
media out of Austin TX. The long time
reader is no doubt aware that Bob, the well-known scholar of Russian
constitutional law, is the older brother of the subject of this blog, the late
Jeff Sharlet, 1960’s ex-Vietnam GI, activist, and underground press founder and
editor; and that the other Jeff in the interview is his son, the best-selling author
and namesake.
The
interview covers a wide range of topics, many of which have appeared in more
detail in this blog, but here, for the first time on air, father and son speak
candidly, not only about the remarkable man who was one’s brother and the
other’s uncle, but also about their own career trajectories and thoughts about
the memoir in progress for which this blog is a precursor. The interview has
been preserved as a podcast here:
“A more congenial man I never knew”
L to R: Bob Sharlet; Jeff, his late
brother; and Jeff, his son
During the
interview you will hear Bob recount his path from aspiring writer at Wesleyan
University in the ‘50s to the army, where he was posted to the Army Language
School (ALS, now the Defense Language Institute). At ALS he was taught Czech, and
then stationed in Germany from where he toured Europe before returning to college,
and becoming a political scientist schooled in the rigors of his field.
His
brother Jeff, expecting to follow in his footsteps, was diverted onto a very different path at ALS – the Army Security Agency (ASA)
anticipated an imminent need for Vietnamese linguists. Jeff’s experience in Vietnam and the
subsequent buildup of American forces there would turn him into an antiwar
activist once he was back in school in the States.
For a
time, he and his brother Bob were at odds over the Vietnam War politically,
each influenced by his personal angle of vision – Bob as an academic Soviet
specialist focused on the Cold War, Jeff as an ex-Vietnam GI activist.
After his
brother Jeff died at a young age in ’69, Bob promised himself he would give his
brother’s short but accomplished career as a founder of the GI Movement** its place in the history of the antiwar
movement. Upon his retirement from academe, Bob at last had the opportunity to
finally fulfill that commitment.
With
invaluable assistance from Karen Ferb, a good friend of his brother’s from long
ago, he set out to make contact with Jeff’s GI buddies, fellow college antiwar
activists, VGI staffers from his
Chicago days, and friends, all of whose memories of Jeff he assiduously
collected. Bob also began studying memoirs to learn how they are made as well
as to help him slip the bonds of analytical social scientific writing. It was not an easy task.
Along the
way his son Jeff blossomed into a writer of national reputation known for his
research skills and for turning out notable creative nonfiction that eventually
landed him in his current professorship at Dartmouth.
Jeff the
son had grown up in a writerly family where Jeff the brother acquired “mythic
status” from Bob’s recounting of his brother’s activism as the founder-editor of
the influential underground paper, Vietnam
GI (VGI).
VGI was the first antiwar paper to be
written by ex-Vietnam GIs for the troops. Jeff the namesake remembers first
stumbling upon issues of the paper as a boy and seeing the uncle he never knew
peering out of his own obituary and later memorialized in verse.
He knew and loved the men
Who write the letters home
And when he came home
He gave them something to believe
in.
…
Not long ago he said:
“We felt a newspaper
Was the best way to begin…
To talk to the enlisted men
The guys on the bottom
Help bridge the gap between
The movement and the people.”
He was a quiet, vital guy
Who thought before he spoke,
…
Courage from his courage
Example of his deeds,
For Jeff is dead…
~ Lincoln Bergman in ‘Seeds of Revolution’
Bob and
his son talked often about the memoir with Bob eventually inviting Jeff to
collaborate on the book. After all, Jeff
was a successful writer and would have much to impart to what he called his
father’s “towering work of historical investigative journalism.” He should know – his own achievements include
the important investigative works The
Family and C Street, both of
which address the fundamentalist threat to democracy in America and elsewhere.
For the C Street book, he traveled at great risk
to Uganda to expose the influence of American fundamentalists and politicians
on the so-called Ugandan “kill the gays” legislation. He later went to Russia
to report on the virulent homophobic movement there – both journeys a kind of
reprise of his uncle’s travels to Sweden and Japan as well as to the GI coffee houses
across America on behalf of beleaguered American servicemen – many of them
hounded by the military for their opposition to the Vietnam War.
_______________________________________________________________
*This post
has been written by Karen Grote Ferb, Bob’s collaborator on the blog.
**For more
information about the GI Movement, underground press, and GI coffee houses, see
http://www.sirnosir.com/ , an award-winning documentary film covering those subjects
dedicated to GI activist Jeff Sharlet.
