Crossing Over, Coming Home

This eyewitness memoir describes conflicts that echo down the decades in divisions that haunt us still. 1968 was a year of revolutionary ferment with few parallels in history, and to witness that pivotal moment as an active participant rather than a bystander was a gift beyond measure. The author's time in the nation's capital was brief - the fall of 1967 through January 1969 - but his timing was uncanny. In sixteen months he saw the siege of the Pentagon; the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.; Hanoi and the North Vietnamese countryside during a fleeting pause in the American bombing, a crossing into what his own country called enemy territory; and the violent confrontations between police and protesters at the calamitous Democratic convention in Chicago. He could hear skulls cracking around him under the blows of truncheons, yet somehow came through the tumult unhurt.Those blows knocked some sense into him all the same, revealing a path of inner inquiry that would bring him closer to peace than political activism ever could. He learned more about politics and social change in those sixteen months than in the sixteen years of schooling that preceded them. He had stumbled, inadvertently, onto a hinge of history.Drawn from journals kept as the events unfolded and weighed against everything that has happened since, the book also includes rare photographs of Hanoi and North Vietnam from a time when few cameras were on hand to record everyday life in wartime.