To Clarify

Kim Worthy, James Clawson,Kelsey Caitlin (kimwort1@idt.net)
Tue, 16 Sep 1997 08:27:09 -0400

Dear Ed, Bruce Franklin, and Everyone Else,

Please accept my humble apologies. I thought my last message had
communicated my compliance with your discernible doubt, Ed. In other
words, when I wrote that I thought it was widely known, I meant
"mistakenly." That's why I said it was "interesting"--meaning it was
interesting that I myself had fallen into the snare I was warning others
against: believing that personal experience brings the status of truth to
what one is ostensibly denying.

I don't want to go further into the topic of physical afflictions or
misinformed acquaintances; but I would not have looked for a former-POW tag
on the book jacket, John, precisely because--no doubt naively--I thought a
superior historian very likely might insist on the publisher not
advertising his "authenticity." In this case, my reading MIA thinking BF
was himself a POW unconsciously stirred in me as a reader an irrelevant
sense of the writer's profound courage by raising the image of the writer
suffering for beliefs which conflict sharply with those of his own peers.

I mentioned Mythmaking in Action to introduce BF only in regard to his
praise of Ehrhart as a veteran who continually questions the romantic image
of both of war and veteran. But of course so does BF. My receiving and
passing along this particular misinformation is quite ironic in this
context.

Thanks.

Kim Worthy