I have made myself a wreck of nerves over next Thursday...I am supposed to go to Tulsa and speak to all of Oklahoma’s librarians.  They chose my book as the “big deal” of the year and want to hear what I have to say about it.  My publisher asked, “Why did you write it?”  Like I would know.  I don’t have a clue.  I just started writing.

The only answer I could come up with was that Americans were spitting on our servicemen as they came home from Vietnam--calling them every bad word imaginable, and cursing them as if they had something to do with America’s policies.  Poor guys got drafted.  They went to war.  Or left the country to get away from it.

I was thinking about the children that they left at home.... and since Ken had nineteen years in the Marines, he got sent.  I was thinking about our children.  How awful it must have felt that their country was blaming him for the war when he had nothing to do with it.  In WWII and Korea, we had parades for our servicemen.  In Vietnam, they got spit on.  All three wars at the mercy of the draft.  We don’t have the draft anymore.