Sitting with Warrior
Sitting with Warrior
Carl Hitchens (author)
Product Description
The glowing campfire was irresistible to his wandering spirit. He had taken many roads, many paths since he had left the war in Vietnam. Each path, each road had taught him something, but still he was nagged by the enormity of what he had experienced. The words that flowed on occasion, the silence that filled the moments in between never seemed to reveal the essence of the truth he sought. But this night in restless sleep, the sleeper went beyond dream into a subtle dimension of reality.
He came upon a Native American man sitting by the fire, smoking his pipe. The man called out to him to come and sit by the fire. He said his name was Warrior, and that the sleeper was not there by accident. This was the beginning of the author's journey out of the shadow of Vietnam.
As a Marine Corps veteran of an unpopular and divisive war, Carl Hitchens contends that Sitting with Warrior chronicles not only his journey, but America's as well. By sitting and listening to Warrior's wisdom, he has recovered lost parts of himself. This gives America hope for stepping out of the long shadow of Vietnam that today stretches over Iraq and Afghanistan. Hope that by sitting with Warrior and his unifying truth, America can heal her old wounds. Hope that she can draw from her pluralism and diversity unity rather than division-"out of many, one."
Product Details
Ebook
File Size: 708 KB
Publisher: iUniverse (December 2, 2010)
Language: English
ASIN: B004I1L1O6
Available at Amazon.com.
Paperback
180 pages
Publisher: iUniverse.com; Print-On-Demand edition (December 1, 2010)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1450276318
ISBN-13: 978-1450276313
Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 8.5 x 0.4 inches
Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces
Available at Amazon.com, Barnes&Noble and iuniverse.com.
Review
Healing the Warrior, July 4, 2011
By Kate Robinson "katerwriter" (Orange County, California)
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, but 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.
