War Baby

"I'm still the only person I've ever met who went both to Vietnam and to Woodstock," writes Dan Mouer in the introduction to his personal tale of life at the front edge of the baby-boomer generation. Dan managed to live out many of the roles cast for someone born at the close of World War II. He was a coffeehouse guitar-strumming Folkie a combat engineer in Vietnam, an anti-war activist, a journalist and photographer for the "underground" press, a back-to-the-land hippie, a single father, a college professor, and a veteran plagued by Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.Dan's life story encompasses so many of the major themes of his times: the Vietnam War, the struggle for Civil Rights, women's rights, gay liberation, and personal relationships during that unique historical moment that was "after the Pill and before HIV." In Dan's view, the baby boomer generation is not "all about rock-and-roll music or getting high or free love." It was a generation born out of history's biggest war, and dominated by one of America's longest and most contentious wars. Dan writes, "We are not 'peaceniks.' We are war babies."