The Kontum Madonna

50 years after the war Hansen continues to mine his time in Vietnam as an 18-year-old machine gunner with the 101st Airborne Division.  These poems inform us that no soldier ever grows so old as to see a war's final ripple.

J. Vincent Hansen grew up on a farm near Sauk Rapids, Minnesota. After high school, he spent three years in the Army followed by seven years working in East Africa as an agricultural volunteer with the Maryknoll Fathers. He is the recipient of the 1990 Loft-McKnight Award for Poetry, and a 2009 Bush Artist Fellowship in Poetry. He is the author of the books Blessed Are the Piecemakers, Without Dividend in Mind, The Medicine of Place, and a multi-media play, The Wedding of Tomorrow and Sorrow. He lives with his wife, Jeanette, in Sauk Rapids, Minnesota. Dick Adair (1935-2018) was a Navy journalist and war correspondent for the military newspaper Stars and Stripes and also the author of the book Saigon published by Weatherhill in 1971. Later in life his art brought him many awards while working as a cartoonist in Honolulu, Hawaii.