Land of Frozen Laughter: A Community Development Volunteer in the Vietnam War, 1967-1969

by John Lewallen

Overview

Written from the viewpoint of a civilian war veteran, Land of Frozen Laughter is the story of John Lewallen's two years as an International Voluntary Services volunteer in South Vietnam at the height of the war. This book offers a unique, uncensored view of wartime life with US soldiers and the people of Vietnam.
John Lewallen reports the full range of experiences that made him become a lifelong activist in the environmental and peace movements:
• The macabre world of the choppers, bases, bars, and brothels of American Vietnam;
• The brutal 1968 Tet Offensive;
• The Montagnards' and Chams' struggle for cultural survival;
• The complex role of a community development volunteer in a wartime environment;
• The glittering parties, frenzied suicidal abandon, and surprising tenderness as Saigon awaits the final communist assault.
Land of Frozen Laughter offers a perspective that complements those of military veterans and gives vivid new life to the written record of a turbulent period in America's history.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940158061707
Publisher:	John Lewallen
Publication date:	04/07/2016
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	208
File size:	630 KB

About the Author

Born November 14, 1942 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, John Lewallen graduated from Juneau High School, Alaska, in 1960, and earned a BA in political science from Whitman College, Walla Walla, Washington, in 1964.
From 1964 to ’65 he was a Fulbright Tutor in English at the University of Rajasthan, Jaipur, India. He lived in a Rajasthani village and wrote an unpublished study titled “Overall Development in a Rajasthani Village.”
In 1967, after completing one year in good standing at Stanford Law School in California, Lewallen dropped out and joined the International Voluntary Services, Inc., with a two-year contract to serve as a community development volunteer in South Vietnam. Returning to his parents’ home in Yachats, Oregon, in 1969 with what became a lifetime commitment to writing and organizing for peace conversion, Lewallen spent several months “debriefing” himself by writing Land of Frozen Laughter.
In 1970 Lewallen moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, where he devoted himself to the antiwar and environmental movements. He wrote Ecology of Devastation: Indochina (Penguin Books, 1972), a study of the US military assault on the environments and peoples of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, which Penguin Books nominated for the 1972 Pulitzer Prize.
John moved to rural Mendocino County in 1978. There he pioneered an industry of independent hand-harvesters of wild edible seaweed. John is a founding member of Mendocino County Chapter 116 of Veterans for Peace.