The Northcountry Chronicle

by W.D. Ehrhart I recently received the following e-mail: “First off, Mr. Ehrhart, thank you for your service. My main question is this: what wisdom do you think you have gained from experiencing the Vietnam War? Do you think that younger generations could learn something from you and your experience?” “Thank you for taking the time to write,” I replied. “What wisdom have I gained from experiencing the Vietnam War? What could younger generations learn from me? I hope I don’t sound too cynical, but what I learned was to question everything I’m told by those in authority. Donald Trump lied to the American people …

Read moreYou Want To Serve Your Country?

by W.D. Ehrhart In December 1985, I made my first postwar trip back to Vietnam. I had gone there in 1967 as an 18-year-old Marine, which had turned out to be a very bad idea and a life-changing experience. Eighteen years later, I wanted to see and experience the country of Vietnam, not the Vietnam War. It turned out to be both a humbling and a healing trip. Very early on, my interpreter, a young man old enough to remember the war but not old enough to have fought in it, asked me if I had been wounded. When I said I had, and then …

Read moreIt’s a Big Universe Out There

by W.D. Ehrhart Lately I’ve been ruminating on American history, in particular on how little most of my fellow citizens know about it. I recently wrote an essay in the Gazette (September 24, 2021) that took note of the missing stanza of our national anthem that condemns the British for offering freedom to American slaves, the missing stanzas of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” that criticize capitalism and the owner class, the overt anti-immigrant racism imbedded in American society, and a number of other fun facts most Americans are oblivious to. I wrote a whole essay (Gazette, October 8, 2021) about a Virginia …

Read moreMore Fun Facts About American History

by Jean Stimmell I take umbrage with Bret Stephens, a conservative columnist for the New York Times, for having the gall to tell me, a staunch liberal, what I believe. He praises paleoconservative Sohrab Ahmari’s new book, The Unbroken Thread for giving a “moral voice…against the values of elite liberalism, above all its disdain for limits, from moral taboos tor national borders.” ⁠1 In the real world, when the right and the left fight over freedom versus limits, it’s not a clear-cut matter. As Max Boot recently wrote, conservatives are willing to accept substantial infringements on civil liberties to combat criminals and terrorists. Yet, they …

Read moreWhat Is the Common Good?

by Paul Nichols Samrawit Silva’s powerfully impassioned letter in the Concord Monitor of September 6th describes the ongoing slaughter of citizens, including some of her family members, by government forces in Ethiopia. She ends the piece with references to the phrase, “Never Again.” But never again is happening again, this time in her home country! History matters. History repeats itself, though maybe not exactly in the same way nor in the same place. And the never again refrain is a historic expression possibly first coined as World War I ended. That war was famously called “The war to end all wars”—in other words, never again. …

Read moreNever Again