THE BOOK I NEVER GAVE DAN ELLSBERG

On Stephen Wright’s Vietnam War novel 'Meditations in Green'

Daniel Ellsberg with author and activist Kay Boyle in San Francisco, 1975. / Photo by Janet Fries/Getty Images.

Dan Ellsberg passed away last Friday—not sure I can get away with the word “peacefully” since Dan spent most of his adult life working for peace and found it mostly in his personal life. He was never discouraged—pained, yes, but never discouraged.

Dan wrote often and brilliantly about the dangers of nuclear weapons. He never despaired, even as the number of nuclear-armed nations grew and as the recent war between Russia and Ukraine, really a proxy war between Washington and Moscow, led to talk of possible nuclear intervention. His 2017 study of that madness, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, is required reading for those who worry about the bomb, as any rational person should.

Dan and I began our friendship bitching about the stupidity and horrors of the Vietnam War and the immense “collateral damage”—a phrase out of a Zombie dictionary, where words no longer resemble their actual meanings—that led to hundreds of thousands (by American estimates) or as many as two million (by Vietnamese estimates) noncombatant Vietnamese deaths. I made what turned out to be a huge mistake in the 1980s by taking Dan to see Oliver Stone’s Platoon. There was a brutal scene of a Vietnamese ambush in the making that had Dan twisting and turning in pain with memories. He kept on saying, “No, no, sir,” and stayed bent over, unable to watch as the scene unfolded. Last weekend I was glad to read an essay by his granddaughter Catherine noting that tears came to Dan often when the two of them went to the movies.

Dan and I never went to the movies again. Instead, we occasionally traded stories of the murderous policies in Vietnam that he had witnessed firsthand, while the war was running hot and cold, and I had unearthed in my reporting from the safety of the United States. We rarely talked about the novels or memoirs that were written about the war simply because I was convinced no one knew as much about the realities as did Dan and, as I think about it, we always stayed in the present when talking about Vietnam. It was a missed opportunity.