John Irving is a story teller. A good one. One of my favorite Irving stories is "A Prayer For Owen Meany", with all the talk of war with Iraq those of us who lived through the Vietnam War are starting to see a lot of parallels with that time. The discussion of the war is much further along, at this point in time than it was then. Then our soldiers were already coming back in body bags. What did I do in the war? I stayed the hell out of it. I joined the National Guard in 1963. The day after my high school graduation I went to Basic Training at Fort Ord, California. There wasn't a war in 1963, but we were sending advisors and towards the end of our training those in the regular army regularly scared the shit out of us talking about how we were going to be activated and sent to Vietnam. I attended the University of Utah upon my return home and watched many of my friends go to Vietnam and never return. Irving's character Owen Meany thought he was going to Vietnam, he had a dream a vision of sorts and so joined ROTC (Reserve Officers Training Corps) in order to go to Vietnam and fulfill his destiny. Owen's family ran a failed granite quarry a reason given for Owen's fractured voice. He spoke in a high falsetto. Here is a clip of John Irving reading a section of the book. This is a shorter clip for those with dialup accounts. If you've read the book and imagined what Owen's voice sounded like, here is your opportunity to hear how John Irving imagined it. The discussion of the war raises the same concerns I now have about Iraq. Of course there would not be a guerilla war in the same way it happened in Vietnam, but it is easy to imagine the same problems "no good way to end it" and the same result. We would win, but what does that mean and at what cost both for us and the people of Iraq. The costs in human life during the war and the rebuilding and suffering afterwards are unimaginable. I hope our President will heed the warnings he is now receiving, but I don't believe he will.

Note: the mp3 clip is about 1.3 megabytes and runs about 2 minutes requiring real patience for those on a dial up, 4 or 5 minutes. The shorter clip is 330k runs about 30 seconds and takes 1 or 2 minutes on a dialup. Those with broadband will have no problems.