best overall
Story By Mike Overall, Photo By Susan O'Connor

The intellectual landscape Dr. Catherine Calloway plies in her courses on Vietnam and Iraq war literature is one indelibly marked by the scourge of mankind’s oldest and most destructive force, war and its constant prevalence among our so-called civilized species.

Calloway, professor and director of graduate studies in English at ASU, is an exceptionally bright, soft-spoken woman who, in a recent interview, was quite willing to discuss and articulate the literature that continues to define, through the body of work produced by some of our finest writers, the plagues, horrors and deaths wrought by the two wars. As she agreed in the interview, some of the parallels drawn between Vietnam and the wars in Iraq/Afghanistan are eerie and not a little foreboding, as they fly in the face of history and the lessons she has writ so large, and for so long, on the futility of “shadow wars,” where the unconventional and unknown have become, in a sense, the rule of combative thumb.

The war in Iraq has hit closer to home in eastern Arkansas, Dr. Calloway said, because approximately 400 soldiers assigned to the 875th Engineer Battalion of the Arkansas Army National Guard were activated and spent a year in Iraq, which a Marine veteran friend of mine once described to me as “the scariest damn place in the world.” The 875th returned from its year-long tour in the war zone last September, and it is probably safe to assume that for those who did come home, their lives, after seeing war up close and personal, will never, ever be the same.

“That war definitely touched home because so many of the soldiers’ loved ones were left behind when the outfit was activated,” Dr. Calloway said. “Support back home for those men and women was a given and it was powerful because unlike in other parts of our country, many, many people in this area of Arkansas were quite aware that some of their own were involved in a terrible war.”

Ever since Dr. Calloway, while a doctoral student at the University of South Florida in 1987, wrote her dissertation on Vietnam war literature, she has felt impelled, and in some instances compelled, to take up the subject of the war’s literature as her educational cause celebre. The latter occurred when she was invited to read her paper before an audience at the University of Hawaii. In that body of listeners was a veteran of the bloodletting in Southeast Asia, the celebrated writer Tim O’Brien, who in 1979 won the National Book Award for his now classic novel of Vietnam, Going After Cacciato.

O’Brien, whose luminescent prose and rushing narrative powers have been a hallmark of such war novels as The Things They Carried and If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home, now lives in the Austin, Texas, area, and holds a distinguished writing chair at Texas State University in San Marcos. One reviewer said of the award-winning Going After Cacciato, “To call it (the book) a novel about war is like calling Moby Dick a novel about whales.”

Calloway and O’Brien have through the years developed a professor-writer kinship that is an obvious delight to the ASU professor. “I’ve had the privilege of interviewing Tim O’Brien,” Calloway said with a smile, “and I think in a way he considers me his bibliographer.”

Dr. Calloway maintains a multiplicity of professional affiliations, including her service on the advisory board for the Philological Review. She writes peer reviews and articles on war literature for book publishers and journals. She has also served as the national area chair for the Vietnam War section of the Popular Culture Association and studied at the Indochina Institute at George Mason University, compliments of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
The professor began teaching Vietnam War literature to ASU’s graduate and undergraduate students in 1990.

Dr. Calloway’s list of Vietnam War writers whose books she has taught includes, in addition to O’Brien, Philip Caputo’s Rumor of War and Michael Herr’s Dispatches, among many others. She also includes in her course literary works “from the other side,” or books authored by Vietnamese writers whose perspective on this nation’s longest war shed a new and vastly different perspective.

When asked if her students, now in the new century, see the Vietnam War as a time warp viewed through a distant lens, Dr. Calloway’s answer may come as a surprise to some. “Many of my students may have had parents or grandparents or other loved ones who served in that war.” She noted that although the war ended in the 1970s, there are many young Americans whose knowledge and awareness of our most protracted war have filtered down to them via the familial level.

While some parallels may be drawn between Vietnam and Iraq/Afghanistan, there are specific ironies and dichotomies that are unique to the current conflagration in the Middle East.

“For the men and women who served there, Vietnam was an “epistolary (letter-writing) war,” Dr. Calloway said. “Our soldiers wrote letters home to impart to their loved ones what it was like to serve there. But in Iraq, because of digital-age technology, our soldiers’ words are coming home in the form of e-mails and blog sites created in real time by those who, while they’re in the war zone, are writing of their experience at that very moment.”

“Because of today’s technology, many soldiers’ parents and other loved ones back home are receiving reports of major battles, significant engagements and incidents of disaster before they are officially informed of such by the military,” Dr. Calloway said.

One of the greater ironies of the war, she agreed, is that in an age when technology is changing at a dizzying pace, the insurgents have employed, with deadly efficiency, a “primitive” weapon, the IED (improvised explosive device), or roadside bomb. Then again, perhaps it is no surprise that in a guerrilla war like Iraq, a crude but deadly instrument of war has killed and wounded so many American soldiers.

The war in Iraq is producing its own body of literature, Calloway said, including John Crawford’s The Last True Story I Will Ever Tell: An Accidental Soldier’s Account of the War in Iraq, and Damon DiMarco’s Heart of War: Soldiers’ Voices from the Front Lines in Iraq.

A native of Winston-Salem, N.C., Dr. Calloway is married to Craig Collison, director of percussion studies at ASU.

September Music Lineup

The 18th annual Blue Fest at Craighead Forest Park will highlight this month’s free entertainment offerings. All sessions will be held at the band shell on Access Road 6. Fans are encouraged to bring lawn chairs or blankets, as no seating is provided. Picnicking facilities are available and coolers are permitted.

Almost 20 bands will entertain festival attendees each Sunday afternoon this month, beginning early and lasting until sunset. Among the groups performing will be The Mudcats, Shugga Shane Band, Hairy Larry & the Flying Hungarians, Snap Crow Legs, Houston Steele and the Country Legends, Jazz Alliance and Suzanne Mitchell. For more information call 870.219.9650. Find the complete itinerary at www.deltaboogie.com.

KASU’s Blue Monday is on Sept. 15 at Brittny’s Steakhouse in Paragould featuring Eric Hughes at 7 p.m. Bluegrass Monday, held at Atkins Celebration Hall in downtown Paragould, will feature the Williams and Clark Expedition on the Sept. 22 at 7 p.m. Both concerts are free.

THE EDGE COFFEE HOUSE — Jazz Alliance will begin regular Thursday evening performances, 7-9, on Sept 28. The sessions are free and donations to musicians are encouraged. Call for information on upcoming performances by trumpeter Rob Alley and his group.

501 RESTAURANT & CLUB, 2628 Philips Drive — Grant Garland Band, Fridays and Saturdays, 9-12 p.m.

The Brickhouse Bar & Grille in downtown Jonesboro features live entertainment on a regular basis. Call for information.

The lineup for El Matador, also in the downtown area, is TBA.