Let's write about a special Veterans Museum in Vermont- Luke's Military Museum

 Published in The New York Times By Jasper Craven who reports on the military and veterans. He is the author of “God Forgives, Brothers Don’t: The Long March of Military Education and the Making of American Manhood.” Visuals by Amina Gingold

The 15-Year-Old Keeping War Memories Alive

On the edge of a goat farm in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom sits Luke’s Military Museum, an aluminum trailer that serves as a loving testament to the nation’s veterans.

The museum’s 15-year-old founder, Luke Morrison, has amassed an impressive collection of military artifacts and collected war stories through hundreds of conversations with veterans.

He is always on the lookout for new subjects to interview. The most obvious tell is a service cap, though Luke will often venture a guess. “If I’m in the grocery store and I see an old guy, I’ll be like, ‘Were you in the military?’ And usually it’ll be, ‘Yes,’” he said.
Exhibits include the uniform of Tim Bedor, an Iraq war veteran; the jump boots of Vinny Matteis, a Vietnam airman; and a Marine pin from Pete Racine, a dare-devilish World War II veteran who, at 92, was said to be the oldest man to stunt flip a car. The antique camper holding these artifacts was purchased by Luke’s great-granduncle, Dwight Cooley, a World War II veteran whose photo sits on a shelf.
Luke may be the youngest person keeping alive an age-old tradition: to process war through the memories and mementos of those who experienced it.

This work is invaluable, occasioned by two federal holidays — Veterans Day and Memorial Day — with additional reminders immortalized in monuments and etched on gravestones. Veterans’ memories inform how this country understands its past conflicts — and ought to influence whether we embark on new ones.
On a recent tour, Luke told me that before his death, a local Vietnam veteran, Harry Swett, donated shoulder patches to Luke’s museum. He also hosted Luke a few times in his living room, where, over hours of war stories, Mr. Swett shared the highs and lows of his military service.

“There’s nights that he’s sleeping in a foxhole that was full of water — I mean, completely submerged,” Luke told me. “And then there’s other times where he’s telling me about having fun with friends.”
Mr. Swett criticized draft dodgers, but after his son, Joseph, was born, he said he would shuttle him north to Canada to avoid the draft if another war broke out — only to lose him in a snowmobile accident at 19. Luke understood Mr. Swett’s wishes. While he relishes the noble stories of military bravery and camaraderie, he understands the perilous stakes for those who serve.
Military technology is promising to reduce human danger in warfare by sharply curtailing our participation in it. The Pentagon will become an “A.I. first” institution, integrating artificial intelligence wherever possible from “campaign planning to kill chain execution.” There is a clean logic to this technological drive, but also a danger of sanitizing conflict. (Makes killings and wars look too much like a "video game".)

War memories like the ones Luke’s museum is dedicated to preserving yield lessons, instincts and wisdom that cannot be computed by A.I.

World War II’s staggering human toll forever haunted Dwight Eisenhower, supreme commander of the Allied forces in Europe. Days after returning to the United States, Mr. Eisenhower told a joint session of Congress that the best way to honor those killed in battle was to ensure “this will not happen again.” As president, Mr. Eisenhower staunchly supported diplomacy and the United Nations, ended combat in the Korean War and, in his famous farewell address, warned about the dangers of the growing influence of the “military-industrial complex.”

Proponents of military technology argue that automation is simply the latest innovation in a long chain of advances that have moved combatants farther away from one another. While the saber required intimate violence, a plane can now deliver mass casualties from thousands of feet in the sky. But humans have always been solidly in charge, able to override a bad order, provide mercy or even defect entirely. It’s hard to picture A.I. doing any of these things.
During my visit to Luke’s museum, I was moved by the experiences of veterans like Mr. Swett, who was hard-working, patriotic and, according to Luke, very funny. His service in Vietnam was an expression of his belief in this country — and Luke loved him for it.
Mr. Swett died in October 2023, a few months before Luke’s museum opened. In the weeks that followed, Luke routinely called his widow, Claudette Swett, to check in, and invited her to his family’s log cabin for Christmas Eve. 

Luke was still in the process of renovating the trailer, so his bedroom served as a temporary exhibit, cramped with mannequins, uniforms and black-and-white war photos.

“He had a table just for Harry,” Mrs. Swett recalled. She was sad that her husband couldn’t see the fruits of Luke’s labor, but she knew how much Luke’s earnest curiosity about Harry’s service in Vietnam had nurtured him in his final days. It is remarkable, Mrs. Swett concluded, that someone of Luke’s age has worked so hard to imagine what it meant to be there.

Julie's P.S. my husband Richard wears one of his veterans hats to the grocery story. He is always stopped by at least one person who says, "Thank you for your service" or by another veteran who just wants to talk. Our local Hannaford grocery has special parking spots for veterans.

Let's write about old fashioned censorship- Remember the Smother's Brothers?

 

Before Jimmy Kimmel, there weree the Smothers Brothers. In fact, 

President Richard Nixon got the brothers’ variety show cancelled after they wouldn’t let up on Vietnam. 

In the wake of the new late-night wars, Dick Smothers is having flashbacks.  Echo article published in The New Yorker Magazine, by Bruce Handy.

An old letter from President Lyndon Johnson has been making the rounds on social media in the wake of ABC’s nervous-gulp suspension of “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” and CBS’s more definitive cancellation of “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert”—decisions noisily lobbied for by our current President, whose minions contributed some Paulie Walnuts-style arm-twisting. The Johnson letter was addressed to Tom and Dick Smothers, the comedians whose hit CBS variety show, “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour,” took shots at the President’s stewardship of the Vietnam War in the late nineteen-sixties. L.B.J. offered magnanimity: “It is part of the price of leadership of this great and free nation to be the target of clever satirists,” he (or a secretary) wrote. “You have given the gift of laughter to our people. May we never grow so somber or self-important that we fail to appreciate the humor in our lives.”

The letter was dated November 9, 1968, five days after Richard Nixon defeated Johnson’s Vice-President, Hubert Humphrey, for the Presidency. Five months after that, with Nixon in the White House, CBS abruptly cancelled the Smothers brothers’ show. The network claimed that the series’ producers violated their contract by not providing finished episodes to its censors in a sufficiently timely manner (an assertion that would not pass muster in a subsequent civil-court case won by the brothers). Many, including the brothers themselves, felt that they were victims not only of skittish advertisers and conservative affiliates but also of the new Administration, which would prove unshy about targeting perceived foes in the media and elsewhere—though one might give that President a wee bit of credit for not going about it quite as nakedly as others.

Dick Smothers, who is eighty-six, took the long view the other day. “It sure didn’t start with us,” he insisted, when asked about politicians’ recurring habit of attempting to muzzle TV performers. “In my lifetime, it started with Edward R. Murrow, of course. But they didn’t fire him. They just switched him to a time slot not many people watched.”  This is true. In 1954, Murrow exposed many of Joseph P. McCarthy’s lies on his CBS news-magazine show, “See It Now,” a tipping point in the senator’s downfall. Just a year later, the series lost its sponsor, Alcoa, and was shunted from its Tuesday-night prime-time slot to random, irregular dead zones on the schedule.

Smothers was speaking on the phone from his home upstate, not far from Niagara Falls, in the village of Lewiston—“a booming economic juggernaut of a hundred and fifty years ago,” as he put it. (A native Californian, he moved there for love.) Tom, his older brother by two years, died in 2023. They first found acclaim, in the early nineteen-sixties, as comedic folksingers, playing night clubs and releasing popular LPs. A failed but apparently likable sitcom led to “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour,” which débuted in February, 1967. It was a broad tent. Guests included Jack Benny, George Burns, Kate Smith, and Red Skelton. “We wanted the people we hung around the radio listening to when we were kids, people that meant something to us,” Smothers said. But the brothers also wanted the program to be “relevant. Not a silly show.” They assembled a legendary writers’ room, which included Steve Martin, Rob Reiner, and Bob Einstein. But relevancy turned out to be a moving, even accelerating target. “The sixties hadn’t really got into top gear yet,” Smothers said. When they did, “it was like being at the scene of an accident.”

The brothers clashed with the network over silly things, like a “Mutiny on the Bounty” sketch with George Segal that had naughty, homophonic fun with the word “frigate.” 

They also got in trouble for more serious efforts, like bringing on Pete Seeger, who was still blacklisted from the McCarthy era, to sing his antiwar song “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy.” But all in all, Smothers said, the show’s satire “was gentle. We didn’t do things that were right in your face, like the monologues today.” That wasn’t meant as criticism: he said that he’s a fan of Kimmel, Colbert, and especially Jon Stewart. “They’re brilliant. Brilliant,” he said. The times, in his view, demand in-your-faceness.

Back in the day, Dick was the duo’s straight man; Tom was the pretend naïf who got the best lines and, backstage, served as the act’s guiding hand. “My brother had a little bad-boy thing,” Smothers said. “But to the day he died he also had a strong moral compass.” To that end, he recalled, Tom wrote an earnest letter to L.B.J. which both brothers signed, “basically not apologizing for what we were doing, but saying that, if we were heavy-handed, we didn’t mean to be.” Johnson’s letter to the brothers was his reply. It concluded, “If ever an Emmy is awarded for graciousness, I will cast my vote for you.”

Needless to say, the current White House occupant, an actual member of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences (though Emmy-less himself), is offering no such absolution. ♦

Published in the print edition of the October 13, 2025, issue, with the headline “Muzzled.”

Let's write about war photography

 The Civil War Photographers Before Kirsten Dunst

Check my Maine Writer Vietnam war history photo in this blog.

After a century and a half, the Civil War-era glass-plate negatives, sensitive to light and air, have been carefully stored. 

The Still Picture Branch of the National Archives contains the glass-plate negatives of the real Civil War, including those by the photographer Timothy O’Sullivan.
Echo essay published in The New Yorker, by Robert Sullivan

Alex Garland’s new film, “Civil War,” follows two war photographers on a road trip from New York to Washington, D.C., via the blue highways of Pennsylvania and West Virginia. 

The more experienced photographer, played by Kirsten Dunst, uses a Sony digital camera, while her apprentice, played by Cailee Spaeny, shoots a Nikon and makes old-school film negatives of a fictional civil war. 

A real-life road trip to Washington, D.C., via I-95, brings you past the National Archives campus in College Park, Maryland, where the archivists in the Still Picture Branch manage the actual photos of the actual Civil War and the negatives from which they were printed. Like Spaeny’s character, actual Civil War photographers developed images in the field, theirs made on glass plates coated with collodion, a syrupy chemical compound that was also used by Civil War-era surgeons as a liquid bandage.

After a century and a half, the Civil War-era glass-plate negatives, sensitive to light and air, have been carefully stored. 

One of the very few people who have come in contact with them during the past two decades is Billy Wade, the Still Picture Branch’s supervisory archivist. There are roughly nine thousand plates from the war and subsequent Western surveys, which ended in the eighteen-seventies. The cabinets that house the plates are sky blue. Each shelf holds about a hundred, all in a NASA-level climate-­controlled room. 

Wade told a visitor, “The other day, I was in there, and I thought, I wonder if anybody will ever ask what they look like, so I took a picture with my phone.” In the image he made, the cabinets have a nineteen-sixties computer-lab vibe: the rows of plates in flapped enclosures could be powerful servers that fuel the national memory bank.

“I’ve got some things pulled,” Wade said. He went away and returned pushing a cart holding prints made by Alexander Gardner, a Scottish photographer who started the war working for the better-­known Mathew Brady, then went out on his own. 

All the photographs were made for what is often called the first photo book, “Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the War.” At the center of Gardner’s book is one of the archive’s most frequently requested photos of the time, made by his partner Timothy O’Sullivan, at Gettysburg, after the battle. Gardner titled it “A Harvest of Death,” and it is fascinating for the way the details of the dead are in sharp focus, while the living are like ghosts. 

After the war, O’Sullivan went West with scientists and soldiers and made what is probably the archive’s most requested survey photograph—a sand dune, about three miles long, in Nevada. That picture features the army ambulance that O’Sullivan converted into a travelling darkroom. The photo of the sand dune, creamy and smooth, is an albumen print, made with an antique process that uses egg whites. (Photographic journals at the time featured cheesecake recipes.)

@LHeureux  www.mainewriter.com Richard LHeureux PN1, USN, Vietnam fox hole Chu Lai MCB 71, in 1967. 
A Maine Writer war history photograph.

Among the fourteen million unique analog photos at the Still Picture Branch are images from every war that has been photographed. It is common for veterans to visit; the parking lot is often dotted with cars bearing Vietnam War insignia. “We’ve had war photographers come in here and say they remember making these pictures,” Wade said.

Recently, Dennis Fisher, a Marine combat photographer now in his seventies, stopped in to see negatives that he had developed in Vietnam, in 1967, and 1968. He was assisted by Cecilia Figliuolo, an archivist with an interest in combat photography, who spoke to him about the photos he had made twenty-eight years before she was born. “One of the first things he said to me was, ‘This is the first time I’ve held these negatives since I was 20 or 21,’ ” she wrote in “The Unwritten Record,” one of the archive’s blogs. Sitting with the veteran, Figliuolo learned details that the archivists could only have guessed at. As Fisher studied a picture of two men firing mortars in May, 1968—part of a U.S. operation to clear land south of Da Nang—he told Figliuolo that he had brought a tape recorder along on the mission, to record the sonic chaos. “Did you take your recorder out with you every time?” she asked.

“No, I took it out once, and it was such a pain in the ass to lug around I never took it out again,” he said.

When Fisher returned home from the archive, he phoned Figliuolo, and played her the cassette tape, but what she remembered long after his visit was that, when he had stared at the battle scenes in the archive, it was as if that audiotape were playing in his head. “In that moment, I could tell that he could hear it,” she said. “He remembered everything.” 

Published in the print edition of the May 6, 2024, issue, with the headline “War Stories on Film.”