Not long after learning of the cancer that would ultimately take his life, my father faced a difficult course of experimental radiation and chemotherapy. As I drove him to the hospital to take his first…
“I was not a man of war, but one of peace” (259). This epiphany came to Stephen G. Biddulph, an LDS combat Marine in Vietnam, as he described a sobering attack he had participated in…
“You shall not do it,” she said. A mere murmur, those words, deceptively soft, even gentle. Almost subliminal, though distinctly determined to anyone who knew her as he did. She had, in fact, employed the…
“Where can I find Captain Vernon Endicott?” Captain John MacDon aid asked one of a cluster of clerks in the 9th Cavalry’s regimental headquarters. “Oh, oh,” the clerk said, looking at the rubber-mat floor behind…
A man of many stories, my father left behind only a handful in the end. Primarily this is my fault; my mind long ago funneled such information into a vast reservoir of forgotten knowledge, where…
That whole war we were never told what
was happening, never given a plan. We thought there
were only a few, but one day they covered
the hilltops around us. One shot would mean a massacre;
“Go get dressed. You’re no man for this army!”
I went, thanking for the first time that crook
In my spine that had stopped me buck naked
From buck privacy, taken me back to you
After a three-hour, not a three-year, separation.
You notice the smells first, more spring, or
even summer, than late fall, the stale-clean
scent of wet sunlit streets after last night’s
heavy rain, the musk of soaked dead leaves,
humid decay in a season usually dry, a
shining solstice sigh through open windows,
suspended on a candent morning breeze.
My “interview” with Diana Hirschi was not so much an interview as a wonderfully civilized conversation over dinner at the Singing Cricket in Salt Lake City. I had never met Diana before, but Karen Moloney…
Quakers, often called Friends, have several core “testimonies” that can be remembered by the mnemonic “SPICE”—Simplicity, Peace, Integrity, Community, and Equality. Each of these interrelated testimonies is essential to our identity as Friends, but we are clearly best known for one of them. As H. Larry Ingle has pointed out, “[T]he Quaker peace testimony [is] the most remarked-on feature of the Religious Society of Friends. When the world’s people think of Friends, they think of our [fundamental disapproval] of war, and when Quakers want to distinguish themselves from other Christian groups, they identify themselves as one of the ‘historic peace churches.'”