The poem you’re about to hear, Letters From Pleiku, was written by an American helicopter pilot in Vietnam. It was found in his possessions after he was shot down on a rescue mission in the Cambodian jungle.
Letters From Pleiku came to our attention because of a moving new book by one of the Nantucket Book Festival’s featured 2020 authors, Daniel Weiss.
Weiss is the President and CEO of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He came across this poem many years ago in an anthology. It resonated so deeply, he set out on a multi-year quest to tell the life story of the soldier who wrote it – Captain Michael O’Donnell.
The result is In That Time: Michael O’Donnell and the Tragic Era of Vietnam.
We will be in conversation next month with Daniel Weiss and a publisher who helped bring the book to life, Peter Osnos, who was a Saigon-based reporter for the Washington Post at the time O’Donnell served in Vietnam.
Kevin Powers, who has read the poem for us here, is the author of the Iraq war novel The Yellow Birds and a book of poetry entitled Letter Composed During A Lull in the Fighting – which is when O’Donnell composed his own poetry.
Kevin is an Iraq war veteran and a Nantucket Book Festival author alum. We will be in conversation with him as well later this summer.
We hope that his reading of Letters From Pleiku moves you, as it did us, and that you are moved to share it on this Memorial Day -- and beyond.
