Carl Hitchens

Around the time author Carl Hitchens was a young, green Marine entering his first hot LZ in the jungles of Vietnam, I was a young countercultural student demonstrating against the unpopular war in the streets of middle America. You might say we were on the opposite ends of a spectrum. In his sobering first book, Sitting with Warrior, Hitchens generously took me to his war and also to sit with Grandfather Warrior, his internal spiritual teacher, who reveals the sweet spot of equanimity between these two destinies. I came away from my reading understanding better how one can embrace the seemingly irreconcilable differences between war and peace.

Hitchens has clearly spent a lifetime probing the depths and shadows of his war experience to find "the beauty in the breaking". Sitting with Warrior is a richly woven tapestry of light and shadow, fact and fantasy, prose and poetry that soars far beyond the boundaries of the tepid patriotic and political rants of ordinary war literature. This little volume pierces the heart of consciousness itself and ultimately merges the creator and the destroyer, and by healing that dichotomy within the warrior, also bridges the paradox that lives within us all.

As the book cover copy so aptly says, "This gives America hope for stepping out of the long shadow of Vietnam that today stretches over Iraq and Afghanistan." In my estimation, Hitchens has sorted through both the universal and place-specific experiences of warfare, the destruction, confusion, pain, death, and unending questions, and has emerged with a lyrical and articulate narrative that is astonishing in its depth and wisdom. Although this book is specifically a guide for the lost veterans of Vietnam, it is also a spiritual map for the veteran of any war, external or internal, physical or spiritual.… (mehr)