Doug Anderson
Vietnam Veteran, Poet
Doug Anderson served as a combat medic in Vietnam. His writing reflects the horrors, tragedies, and unlikely friendships of that time.
A meticulous, unerring chronicler, he is the author of the poetry collections The Moon Reflected Fire (1994), the winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and Blues for Unemployed Secret Police (2000) and Horse Medicine (2015). In 2000 he published his memoir, Keep Your Head Down: Vietnam, the Sixties, and a Journey of Self-Discovery.
Recipient of a Pushcart Prize, an NEA grant, and a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship, Anderson taught at the University of Connecticut and the William Joiner Center for the Study of War and Its Social Consequences.
KEEP YOUR HEAD DOWN
Vietnam, the Sixties, and a Journey of Self-Discovery
W.W. Norton & Co. – July 13, 2009
An award-winning poet highlights the vibrant history of his generation in a farewell to Vietnam, the chaotic sixties, and their long aftermath.
Doug Anderson’s education in American manhood began in the pre–civil rights South, around the kitchen sink. There he listened as his uncles told war stories in-between drafts of Wild Turkey and drags on their cigarettes. Anderson thought he had come to understand something about heroism and his country. At twenty-three years old, those childhood tales of postwar patriotism disintegrated in the maelstrom that was Vietnam. A combat medic, Anderson confronted a haunting reality that drove him to the brink of madness.
He made it home but remained deeply troubled, unable to reconcile his past with a United States now populated by militant protestors on one hand and people who ignored and denied what they saw on their televisions on the other. In response, Anderson plunged headlong into the sixties. He returned to the University of Arizona, where he’d studied music before the war, and pursued acting. He soon found he could “go to a demonstration, get stoned, drunk, blasted, stay out all night, show up the next day for rehearsals, quickly memorize lines and blocking, have more than one sexual relationship, and still function.” Anderson’s immersion in sex, drugs, and alcohol brought him to the edge of a full breakdown, but he gradually found his equilibrium through writing, the one outlet that enabled him to explain, and to face, his emotions.
In KEEP YOUR HEAD DOWN, Anderson has crafted an unconventional and moving memoir. As he veers deftly between open-hearted confession, darkly absurdist humor, and surreal experiences in war and peace, he reveals a poet’s eye for the weight of small gestures and a playwright’s ear for dialogue. Anderson’s long journey of self-discovery culminates in a return trip to Vietnam in 2000, where he meets with former enemies who are now writers and poets. Moved by the realization that “the last time I saw these people they were trying to kill me,” Anderson confronts the past and calls on a story—this powerful story of struggle and the power of the written word—to rebuild a life.
