MCM Books News

by Alfredo E. Cardenas On May 25, thirty-two years to the day from its first observance, America’s Last Patrol Ranch will celebrate Memorial Day at its headquarters in Duval County.  MCM Books’ author Ovidio Garcia will attend and share with his fellow Vietnam Veterans his experiences as presented in his book My War, My Art , published earlier this year. As publisher of the Duval County Picture in 1986, I had the privilege of chronicling the founding of the Last Patrol Ranch by a group of Vietnam Veterans from San Diego. The purpose of the ranch was then, as it is now, to keep a focus on their comrades, classified  POW/MIA. In addition, it was then, as it is now, a place for “brotherhood.” As I described it in 1986, it was a place for many who “can’t, won’t and don’t forget the experience. It is welded into their psyche. It was beaten, burned, and shot into their young minds and it won’t leave it.” Ovidio Garcia In My War, My Art , Garcia presents his experiences in Vietnam through a

TEXANA READS: Vietnam veteran combines stories, art to convey horrific experience Ovidio Garcia saw the enemy up close. Two tours of Vietnam – most of the time in combat – solidified his images of war. The memories are hard-wired into his brain. They are with him for the rest of his life.

Michigan War Studies Review – book reviews, literature surveys, original essays, and commentary in the field of military studies Review by Thomas G. Palaima, The University of Texas-Austin Ovidio Garcia tells us in his introduction that, during his two tours as an airborne infantryman in Vietnam (1966-67, 1971-72), he saw only one army photographer “and he was killed on his second day of insertion into his unit” and that personal cameras were not allowed because of “intelligence factors” (x).

Memories in Green: A mind’s fifty-year journey from drafted to PTSD, Reflections from Viet Nam by Beto Conde Review by Ben Figueroa The Vietnam War was unique in that the birth of PTSD brought back by countless veterans has haunted veterans of foreign wars before and since Vietnam, but we did not know it to be a lifelong demon. In addition, Agent Orange devastated those veterans who survived the Vietnam War and came back only to be turned away and questioned by the Veteran’s Administration that the dangerous toxin used to kill the jungle brush did not affect our veterans who were also sprayed with it.   Ben Figueroa Beto Conde from San Benito, Texas, has given us a very real glimpse of what it was for a soldier fighting in the jungles of Vietnam. His book is exemplary of the many veterans who have suffered the demons of PTSD and Agent Orange. It is a vivid and truthful reminder that freedom isn’t free, our veterans who died in the war and came back to suffer a lifetime fought for our f

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text] Friendly fire. [/vc_column_text][vc_separator border_width=”2″ css=”.vc_custom_1549390341395{padding-top: 10px !important;padding-bottom: 10px !important;}”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text] On Tuesday, February 19, Ovidio Garcia, author and Vietnam veteran, will make a presentation about his book  My War, My Art  and his war experiences to a class at the University of Texas at Austin. [/vc_column_text][vc_separator color=”white” border_width=”4″][vc_text_separator title=”” color=”white” border_width=”4″][vc_column_text][/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text] Thomas G Palaima, Ph.D., Robert M. Armstrong Centennial Professor invited Garcia to come in and discuss his images, words, and experiences and the process of painting and writing his book with students in Palaima’s Plan II Honors Program junior seminar TC 358 Myths of War and Violence. [/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_colu

Even now, fifty years after his return from Vietnam, Ovidio Garcia still sees danger when he encounters a treeline at the end of a field. Fifty years ago the United States was in the midst of cataclysmic social turmoil. In a short period of five years, assassins gunned down three of its most prominent leaders; President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Martin Luther King in Memphis, and Robert Kennedy in Los Angeles. Hundreds of thousands of young people were in the streets protesting discrimination, politics and “the War in Vietnam!” Meanwhile, clear across the other side of the world, in a place most people could not find on the map, tens of thousands of other young men and women were engaged in a life and death struggle in the jungles of a place called South Vietnam, to distinguish it from its enemy North Vietnam. Presumably, the Vietnamese knew why they were fighting, but most of the young Americans called to arms in this faraway place had no idea. They were following orders. some volu