Q&A with Jessica Pearce Rotondi

Photo by Beowulf SheehanJessica Pearce Rotondi is the author of the new book What We Inherit: A Secret War and a Family's Search for Answers. It focuses on her family's search to find out what happened to her uncle Jack, who disappeared in Laos during the Vietnam War. Rotondi's work has appeared in a variety of publications, including The History Channel and Time. She lives in Brooklyn.

Q: You write, “To find out what happened to Jack was to find out why we don’t talk about death in the Pearce family, why we cling to hope past its expiration date. I wanted to know Jack so I could understand her [your late mother]." Can you say more about why you decided to write this book?

A: I lost my mother when I was 23 and was desperate for some sort of message from her, a directive about how to live my life without her. The day she died, I found myself staring into her closet. She had been sick for so long, most of her clothes were still hanging in clear sheets of dry cleaner’s plastic.

I remember the odd sensation of the sleeves of her coats clinging to my arms like I’d clung to her hours earlier. When I moved them aside, I found boxes and boxes of letters, declassified CIA documents, and letters about her brother Jack, who went missing during the Vietnam War.

Her obsessive hunt for him spanned almost 40 years and forced me to reexamine a great deal about my childhood and my mother. While she was teaching me to walk, then drive, she was carrying this unresolved grief—and holding onto hope that Jack would still be found.

I was shocked that she could keep such a huge part of her life from me. Finding those newspaper headlines was the bolded message I had been looking for, and I knew instantly that I would do everything in my power to complete her search.

It was finding Mom’s own book a few months later that made me decide to write What We Inherit. I was home for Christmas and uncovered an unpublished children’s book manuscript that Mom had written back in the early ‘90s. She had sent it to exactly one publisher and gotten rejected, so she never sent it anywhere else.

Getting her words published became a personal goal for me and finding that manuscript felt like the permission I needed to put her story out into the world.

Q: The book includes sections that take place in 2013, interspersed with chapters that take place earlier. How did you decide on the book's structure, and did you write it in the order in which it appears?

A: What We Inherit follows three generations of my family as we search for the truth about what happened to my uncle Jack, whose plane disappeared over Laos on March 29, 1972.

The book is told from two perspectives: My own, beginning with the day my mother died and going across modern-day Laos and Thailand; and my grandfather’s, beginning with the morning he learns his son has been shot down and going until his death.

I’m a journalist by training and the book was originally a first-person reported narrative, but that all changed when I came across a personal artifact that changed everything: Jack’s dog tags. They slid out from the file I was holding and quite literally fell into my lap.

I knew that they had touched Jack, that my grandfather and mother had held them, and felt in my bones what that experience must have meant to them. I knew then that to tell the story of Jack, I had to tell the story of a father who had been a prisoner of war, then lost a son in another, very different war. I needed to show my mother losing Jack at the same age I lost her.

Throughout the book, I include found objects like Grandpa Ed’s prisoner of war identification card from Stalag 17 and my mother’s passport photo because I want the reader to discover them when the characters do. Their search becomes yours.

I originally wrote the present-day narrative from start to finish, then I wrote my grandfather’s arc. The final, most difficult part was weaving them together and maintaining that suspense. The structure was the most challenging part of this book, but it’s now the element I’m the most excited for readers to experience.

Q: What impact did writing this book have on you?

A: This book brought me closer to my mother and grandfather. In some ways, my research into the moments that defined them gave me the chance to “meet” them at my age. I understand more about where I come from and the people who raised me.

I also learned more about Laos and the CIA-led war that left Laos the most heavily bombed country in the world. I’m a contributing editor at The History Channel, and the revelations I uncovered about the war have deeply informed how I approach writing about history. So much of history is left out of history books, and I hope we see even more stories about Laos in the days to come.

Q: How was the book's title chosen, and what does it signify for you?

A: The title of What We Inherit reflects a major theme of the book: How our family’s past influences who we become. It’s taken from Lord Byron’s poem “Prometheus,” which opens the book:

“…A mighty lesson we inherit: Thou art a symbol and a sign                  

To Mortals of their fate and force; Like thee, Man is in part divine,                 

A troubled stream from a pure source;

And Man in portions can foresee His own funereal destiny;

His wretchedness, and his resistance,

And his sad unallied existence:

To which his Spirit may oppose Itself—and equal to all woes,                  

And a firm will, and a deep sense,

Which even in torture can descry                  

Its own concenter'd recompense,

Triumphant where it dares defy…”

Jack was shot down in a plane named “Prometheus” after the Greek Titan who stole fire from the gods to bring to man. In the myth, Zeus punishes Prometheus by strapping him to a stake on Mount Kaukasos as an eagle feeds on his liver—or, according to some accounts, his heart.

But Prometheus can never die; his body regenerates night after night. He’s forced to linger in his suffering, not really living and not quite dead.

For years, Air Force documents about Jack sealed with eagles tormented my grandparents, throwing them wildly from hope to despair. This in-between place of frozen grief was a place my family lived in again after my mother’s cancer diagnosis, essentially repeating the past.

I hope that readers come away from the book inspired to examine how their own families have shaped their narratives but also with the knowledge that we don’t have to be defined by the people who raised us; it’s up to us to take those lessons and decide what to do with them.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: A novel that I’m excited to reveal more about soon!

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: If you’d like to learn more about What We Inherit or the Secret War in Laos, visit http://www.jessicapearcerotondi.com/.

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. This interview also appears on Book Q&As with Deborah Kalb.

Q&A with Rita Dragonette

Rita Dragonette is the author of the novel The Fourteenth of September. A former public relations executive, she lives in Chicago.

Q: How did you come up with the idea for The Fourteenth of September, and for your character Judy?

A: The story is based on my personal experiences on campus during the most tumultuous time of the Vietnam War and the height of the protest against it—1969-70. I had long wanted to write a story about that era, which hasn’t been given enough attention and, in particular, to tell it from a woman’s point of view.

I also wanted to address my interest in the subject of women and war (my mother was a World War II vet who spent three years overseas during that conflict) and the marginalization of women’s experiences in war.

With The Fourteenth of September I gave my main character, Judy, a dilemma with the same emotional gravitas as the one faced by any man of the time— if drafted would he go to Vietnam or Canada? 

 Judy’s decision is equally fraught—she’s in college on a military scholarship but joins the anti-war movement, risking both future and family, and has to make a life-altering decision. They are similar coming of conscience questions.

My intention was to eliminate the gender issue and even the stakes. When there is a war we are all in it—experiences may differ but they are of equal value. The argument applies across the spectrum of feminist issues.

I knew Judy well and wanted to tell the story of those times (so similar to today’s unrest) through the eyes of a young woman on the brink of adulthood, who open-heartedly believes the world can be changed.

Q: Did you need to do any research to write the novel, and if so, did you learn anything that especially surprised you?

A: Because I’d lived through the era, I didn’t need to research from the ground up. I knew the language, the clothing, the setting and, I thought, all the dates.

However, I was surprised during fact-checking to discover, for example, that the first Lottery drawing was held the Monday we all returned to campus after the Thanksgiving holiday, which is particularly cruel, if you think about it. I was able to use that emotion in the story. 

Research also heavily influenced my timeline.  I was determined to keep my story to a single school year, September—May, to coincide with the time frame that I felt defined the character of the generation dramatized in the novel—from the first draft lottery through Kent State. 

But I found there wouldn’t have been time for any characters with a low lottery number to actually go to Vietnam before the end of the story. I had to change the narrative arc of several to accommodate the reality of what could or couldn’t have happened. Historical fiction has guidelines—everything in it either needs to have happened or could have happened.

Q: How would you compare the protests against the Vietnam War with the protests unfolding today?

A: Issues of history and privilege make comparisons complicated, but in general if people hit the streets it’s because they feel they’ve tried all the regular channels, haven’t been listened to, and feel powerless.

During the ‘69-‘70 time frame of the novel, the world was equally split, particularly between those who felt America could never lose a war and those who more realistically felt we needed to cut our losses and get out of Vietnam. Men too young to vote were being sent to die and no one was listening—hitting the streets seemed the only way to get attention. 

I was actually out in the first night of the street action in Chicago after the George Floyd murder and it felt so much like what happened after Kent State, which is depicted in detail in The Fourteenth of September, and I found the similarities to be startling.

People expressing their right to free speech were murdered on television. Universities across the country were ablaze in rage and solidarity. There were factions for destruction as well as for calm. The National Guard was involved. There were arrests. It took time to recapture the message. Kent State ended up being very important, a turning point in support for the war.

The current issues of police brutality and racial inequality have been longer in making and will take longer to address, but the impetus and reaction are alarmingly similar. I call it the “hamster wheel of history.” We need to learn from our historical experience how not to let things get to this point again and again.

Stories like The Fourteenth of September are instructive, cautionary, and vital. The stories out of today’s protests will be the same. 

Q: What do you hope readers take away from the novel?

A: My belief is that we learn our history through facts and nonfiction, but we understand it through narrative. I would like every reader to experience the six months depicted in the novel in Judy’s shoes and wonder what they would have done in the same circumstances.

And, if possible, share it with family members and start a dialogue about how those times impacted their own families—it’s only been 50 years. People have stories to tell, probably have been reluctant to tell. Few families have been unaffected. 

Q: What are you working on now?

A: I’m working on a new novel that is an homage to Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. It’s a contemporary generational story about expats who have come to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico with their last dreams. 
I’m also working on a memoir in essays and plans for a third novel about two women during World War II, one German and one American, and the impact of their war experiences on their families through the generations.

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: The Fourteenth of September is a coming of conscience story. Judy faces a life-altering choice that she believes will define her character for the rest of her life. I define coming of conscience, as a point when integrity trumps consequences. 

Today, we are living in times where we are watching people of great courage make coming of conscience decisions every day: Mitt Romney voting for impeachment, Captain Brett Crozier of the Theodore Roosevelt who made a career-ending move to protect his crew from COVID-19, etc. In this highly charged environment, we will continue to see more.

Judy was right, we have a responsibility to change the world. Her message is happening as we speak. The Fourteenth of September is “living” historical fiction, its issues and events as relevant today as when they first happened.

One final important note. I don’t want to create the impression that The Fourteenth of September is a tough story. It has many dimensions: mother/daughter, generation gap, first love, college life, girlfriends, etc. And, let’s remember it starts in the ‘60s—it’s also full of sex, drugs, and rock and roll (it even has its own play list).

It’s a lively read. Enjoy.

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. This Q&A also appears on Book Q&As with Deborah Kalb.

Q&A with Deborah Paredez

Deborah Paredez is the author of the new poetry collection Year of the Dog. She also has written Selenidad and This Side of Skin, and her work has appeared in a variety of publications, including The New York Times and the Los Angeles Review of Books. She is a professor of creative writing and ethnic studies at Columbia University, and she lives in New York City.

Q: What inspired you to write Year of the Dog, which focuses on the Vietnam War and its legacy?

A: A couple of things. The first thing was a lifelong obsession with the legacies of the Vietnam War, especially in Latino communities. My father was a Mexican immigrant, and he got his citizenship papers just in time for his draft notice.

When he returned from Vietnam, it was not talked about, but it took up space in the household. I began writing about it to fill the void. This was the book I was meant to write.

Also, I remember as a kid that because it wasn’t talked about, I would pore over photographs and snapshots from Vietnam, thinking maybe if I look, I’ll get some answers. It was part of the archive of my understanding about the war.

The war was hyper-documented through iconic images we have, and simultaneously, there’s so much we have to [undo] because we assume we know it.

Q: I was going to ask you about the photos and other text you include in the book. How did you decide on the book’s layout, and on the pictures to incorporate?

A: I had my father’s photos, and I had an interest in using photos in a way to buttress them against the iconic images—and also preserve my father’s privacy. You don’t see his face. The images of body parts emerged in the collaging. I started to cut and paste on my own. It was an organic process for me. I asked how the images could resonate with the work the poems are trying to do.

The opening image is of a village; the rear-view mirror is in the image—it’s an image of looking back.
How I chose the images—I wanted to focus on those that featured women. So much of the book is grounded by feminist imagery, the image of Hecuba crying out. I’m interested in women of color and women on the margins.

Q: Did you need to do much research to write the poems, and, if so, did you learn anything that especially surprised you?

A: I did a lot of research, at least for the poems based in the historic period. There’s a series of poems about Kim Phuc [the girl featured in an iconic Vietnam War photo]. I read the book by Denise Chong, which served as a starting point for her life. I looked at a lot of archival news and magazine articles.

I read about Latinos in Vietnam more generally.

What surprised me is part of the reason why the participation of Latinos is so hard to document—they were racially classified as white. You couldn’t rely on data collected around race or ethnicity. And Spanish surnames weren’t so easy to [figure out].

There’s the story of Mary Ann Vecchio [who appeared in a famous photograph of the Kent State shootings]—she was 14, a runaway, caught in the whirlwind of history. Her life was really hard after that.

Q: How did you decide on the order in which the poems would appear in the collection?

A: Some of that happens after a million times of printing them out and putting them on the floor. But I knew I wanted the first section to be reflecting on the period surrounding 1970.  As I was writing the Kim Phuc poems, I knew that would be its own section.

There’s a pivot in the middle of the book. 

Also, the poems can be quite difficult for people to encounter. I wanted to [look at] perpetual war, women’s roles, gun violence on school campuses. I wrote it in 2018, when there was the most violence on school campuses in U.S. history. I wanted the third section of the book to extend to the present.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: I write prose in addition to poetry. I’m working on a book about divas. I write a lot about performance and women. My first book was about the legacy of Selena. This book is about what divas meant for us, to me in particular, and to women of color. It’s a series of essays, and each one is about a different diva.

Then in my poetry, I have a book that’s unfinished, that’s difficult to write, about a dear aunt of mine who’s developed Alzheimer’s. It’s a book about women and memory.

They’re very different projects. The divas book is a nice place to land after the horror of war.

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: As much as I wanted folks to be reawakened to the horror in images we’re accustomed to, I wanted to do the same with language. I’m interested in taking idioms focused on body parts and make them strange, disturbing, and fresh again.

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. This interview also appears on Book Q&As with Deborah Kalb.

Q&A with Heath Hardage Lee

Heath Hardage Lee is the author of the new book The League of Wives: The Untold Story of the Women Who Took On the U.S. Government to Bring Their Husbands Home from Vietnam. She also has written Winnie Davis: Daughter of the Lost Cause. She has worked in museum education, and she lives in Roanoke, Virginia.

Q: How did you learn about the women you wrote about in The League of Wives, and at what point did you decide to write this book?

A: Phyllis Galanti, the blond woman in the center of the cover, was a good friend of my mother’s. I knew her growing up, but didn’t know much about her. My first book was about Civil War women. I thought, I should talk to Phyllis about her activism in the Vietnam War, and then she died unexpectedly in 2015.

I was on a book tour about the first book, speaking at the Virginia Museum of History and Culture. I’m always looking for hidden history about women. They said there’s something you need to see—Phyllis had donated her papers.

She had left [what was like] a treasure map. She was important, but Sybil Stockdale was where everything emanated from. Phyllis’s papers led me to Sybil Stockdale, and to the West Coast. I met with Sybil just before she passed away. Her sons were with us. I got permission to see her diary.

Between Phyllis’s papers, Sybil’s diary, and Jane Denton in Virginia Beach—her family gave me her diary and it led me to dozens of women who gave me papers, diaries, clothes for an exhibit [on the same topic as the book].

I’m a curator, also, and I thought, I’ve got to do something with this. I decided to do a book and an exhibit at the same time! It worked out, and we got through it. One person would lead to another. It took almost five years to do it.

Q: You focus on various women in the book, but the two major figures are Sybil Stockdale and Jane Denton. Why did you focus on them, and what do you see as their legacies today?

A: [It was important] to have a West Coast and an East Coast person. With naval bases, they tend to be on the coasts. There’s been so much wrong information about this group of women. The myth is that multiple people founded the National League of Families. It was Sybil Stockdale.

Sybil is probably my favorite character in the book. She’s such a strong character, so smart and capable. She would have been a great president. In another era, she could have been a rock star politician or diplomat. In this era, she was just as important, heading up the movement to [free] the POWs.

Jane Denton was the opposite of Sybil. She was a traditional, rule-bound person who had to fight hard to throw off the conventions of a military wife. She was more of a Southern woman taught to toe the line. Sybil was a New Englander, speaking out. It worked well to have people like Sybil and like Jane, who was more diplomatic and would smooth things over.

They all were worried their husbands could be harmed if they spoke out. They were all wary of speaking to the press. They said at the end that we are going to do whatever it takes, even speaking with peace activists.

Q: What were some of the surprises you found in your research?

A: Of course the coding of secret letters [they would write] was so cool. With the Stockdales, there are real details in her diary. I tried to give generalities—some in that generation are upset when you talk about specifics. I never knew any of that.

Some of the facts of the war, like the Gulf of Tonkin incident, were such a farce. They were used by Johnson to get into the war. I was born in ’69 and was never conscious of it. Our government under Johnson, what a total disaster. Johnson was a piece of work, but I didn’t know how much of one, how much of a disaster the planning and execution of the war were.

And that these women, none of them considered themselves feminists. It was considered a dirty word associated with communism and the left. They considered themselves human rights activists. 

But then it seeps in as they have more power. I wouldn’t say they evolve into feminists, but they became powerful independent women. It was not a question to them that they knew how to handle things, but they borrowed things from the [feminist] movement and from the civil rights movement.

You can’t project what you think. You’re the tour guide as a historian. I want them to be feminists and they aren’t—it was something I learned that’s more about myself, not to project your stuff on other people.

Q: What do you hope readers take away from the book?

A: I would like these women to be in the history books. They were so important and have never gotten credit. Even some of their husbands didn’t understand that they went over and above to get them out.

The fact that they organized a national group and had so much power—organizing as a group instead of as individual voices is effective. They got stationery, a bank account, and that legitimized them.

And giving them credit for the amazing thing they did, how their husbands would have died or wouldn’t have been rescued for a long time had the women not gone forward.

A lot of government officials are still trying to take credit for this. They have the point of view that the government did this. The government gave them a platform, but the women did this.

It changed the image of military wives—they’re not just passive, hosting parties. They’re powerful and smart and got things done.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: It’s always going to be about women. This is the tip of the iceberg in terms of these stories. There are tons of them. The next time is the ‘20s—something with World War I as the backdrop. It will have flappers and suffragists. I’m still working on it.

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: The movie with Reese Witherspoon! It’s been optioned by Hello Sunshine and Fox 2000, and I’m an executive producer. We’re moving forward pretty quickly with that. It’s great to bring the story to another audience.

The exhibit opened March 1 in Richmond, Virginia, at the Virginia Museum of History and Culture. It will be there until September and then it’s going to West Coast venues including the Nixon Library. It’s important to have multiple platforms. 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. This interview also appears on deborahkalbbooks.blogspot.com.

Q&A with Steve Watkins

Steve Watkins is the author of the new young adult novel On Blood Road, which takes place during the Vietnam War. His other books include Sink or Swim and Great Falls. He is a former professor of journalism, creative writing, and Vietnam War literature, he cofounded a nonprofit yoga studio, and he lives in Fredericksburg, Virginia.

 
Q: How did you come up with the idea for On Blood Road and for your character Taylor?

 
A: I guess it grew out of the idea that we were all tourists in a weird way, in terms of our involvement in the War in Vietnam. During the war you actually could go there as a tourist, and many did.

Plenty of family members made the trip over--at least to Saigon and protected areas on the coast. Continental Airlines flew direct from the States, I think.

If you read accounts of the war from the American perspective, most of them barely mention the Vietnamese, except as marginal players--either illiterate villagers who were either Viet Cong spies or hapless victims, evil North Vietnamese who happily tortured, ambushed, maimed, and killed in cowardly ways, or prostitutes.

None of which was true, except in the popular American consciousness, and the terrible John Wayne film The Green Berets.

So I wanted to take a privileged kid from the States, clueless about what was really going on and not having to think too much about it, and drop him into the center of the insanity. Also this year is the 50th anniversary of the Tet Offensive and the Siege at Khe Sanh.

Q: What type of research did you do to write the novel, and did you learn anything that especially surprised you?

A: A LOT of research, starting years ago when I first began teaching a college course on the literature of the Vietnam War. So I've read a considerable number of accounts of the war over the years--novels, short stories, poems, memoirs, historical accounts, analyses, films, documentaries--that helped prepare me to write this book.

I read a number of books and articles on the so-called Ho Chi Minh Trail (Blood Road), including the definitive work on the subject by the journalist John Prados, who Scholastic actually ended up hiring to vet the manuscript of On Blood Road, which was quite an honor, and quite nerve-wracking as I waited for him to pass judgement as it were.

Not surprising, exactly, but heart-breaking nonetheless, was learning, or being reminded of, the utter devastation from the bombing we did for years in North Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia to interrupt the supply lines, and the countless victims of those millions of bombs even today.

Q: Did you know how the novel would end before you started writing it, or did you make many changes along the way?

A: Didn't know, but certainly hoped Taylor would find a way to survive. The Vietnamese characters grew in importance as I wrote the book, as you might expect, and that determined--and changed--a lot of the directions I may originally have had in mind. I must have written the ending a dozen times or more. 

Q: How much do you assume your readers will know about the Vietnam War before coming to the book, and what do you hope they take away from it?

 
A: Younger readers won't know much, which is why we added the truncated summary of the war in the Author's Note at the end, and why there are some hopefully non-intrusive expository sections in the novel, to provide enough context for events for readers who aren't up to speed on the history.

I hope they come away with a thousand questions about the war they want to explore for themselves. And an understanding of the deep complexities of this and any war and the people who fight in it and are affected by it.

Q: What are you working on now?

 
A: A novel about teenagers in the French Resistance in Occupied France during World War II, and the tragic experiences of some of them who were sent to the only Nazi-run concentration camp (and associated work camps) in France during the war, in Alsace-Lorraine. Truly terrible, terrible stuff that I'm having a difficult time getting my writer's head around how to handle. 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 
A: Yes. We absolutely need stricter gun laws in this country, and it's criminal negligence that we don't. Off topic, I know, but perhaps not really.

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. This interview can also be found on deborahkalbbooks.blogspot.com.