Poet Brian Turner. Photograph by Kim Buchheit.

An Army veteran whose service included a year in Iraq as an infantry team leader, poet Brian Turner reads from his work at �ֲ���ý in a Language Arts Live event at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 27, in the Edmund S. Muskie Archives, 70 Campus Ave.

For more information, please call 207-786-6256.

The following evening, Turner reads at 6 p.m. Friday, Sept. 28, in Callahan Hall, Lewiston Public Library, 200 Lisbon St., in conjunction with Art Walk Lewiston Auburn. Both events are open to the public at no cost, and are supported in part by the Lewiston Public Library, the Harward Center for Community Partnerships and the Spanish department at �ֲ���ý College, and the Maine Humanities Council.

Turner is the author of two poetry collections, Phantom Noise (Alice James Books, 2010) and Here, Bullet (Alice James Books, 2005), which won the 2005 Beatrice Hawley Award, the New York Times “Editor’s Choice” selection, the 2006 Pen Center USA “Best in the West” award, and the 2007 Poets Prize, among others.

Turner served seven years in the U.S. Army, including one year as an infantry team leader in Iraq with the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division. He was deployed to Bosnia-Herzegovina 1999-2000 with the 10th Mountain Division.

Turner’s poetry has been published in Poetry Daily, The Georgia Review and other journals, and in the Voices in Wartime anthology published in conjunction with the feature-length documentary film of the same name.

Turner was also featured in Operation Homecoming, a documentary that explores the firsthand accounts of American servicemen and women through their own words. He earned a master’s of fine arts degree from the University of Oregon and has lived in South Korea. In 2009, Turner was selected as one of 50 United States Artists Fellows.

The poems in Here, Bullet reflect Turner’s experiences as a soldier with penetrating lyric power, compassion, sensitivity and eloquence, while deploring the violence and acknowledging the grief and terror of war.

In Phantom Noise, Turner tells us what happens to a person and a culture when a soldier brings the war home with him. Poet Louis McKee wrote, “Turner’s intention is neither to romanticize nor to protest the war but simply to bring its ironies and madness, its sad and difficult truths, into the light — a light that perhaps will exorcise the demons.”

Turner was selected as a featured poet for the L/A Arts poetry series The Poet As Art due not only to the quality of his work, but for his connection to other L/A Arts collaborative events surrounding veterans’ health and awareness. September marks a large undertaking of numerous community organizations to honor veterans in our community, with participants including Tri-County Mental Health, L/A Arts, �ֲ���ý, the Lewiston Public Library, Aquila Theatre Company, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Maine Humanities Council.
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Nate Boone’s yearbook photo in the 1952 Mirror.

As he and his fellow Marine Corps veterans prepared to receive the Congressional Gold Medal in June, Nathaniel Boone ’52 recalled for the media his experiences as one of the first black U.S. Marines.

Twenty thousand African-American Marines, including Boone, went through basic training at the racially segregated Montford Point facility at Camp LeJeune, N.C., between 1942 and 1949.

To honor their pioneering achievements, Congress presented Boone, a retired lawyer who lives in Manchester Center, Vt., and his fellow 367 surviving Montford Point veterans the nation’s highest civilian honor, the Congressional Gold Medal, on June 27.

Sixty-six years ago, Boone was a Marine recruit traveling by train from his home in Englewood, N.J. to Washington, D.C. There, in the nation’s capital, Boone entered the segregated, Jim Crow South.

Nate Boone stands outside his home in Manchester Center, Vt. Photograph by Patrick McArdle/Rutland Herald.

“I knew what was going to happen because my mother and my aunt, her sister, were born and raised in Georgia,” Boone . “They told me what to expect and told me I would have to get in the back of the bus when I reached Washington, D.C., which was true. That’s where the segregation started: In our nation’s capital,” he said.

From there they headed to the Montford Point facility, which was more like a “rattlesnake-infested swamp,” Boone tells CBS affiliate WCAX-TV in Burlington.

The rattlesnakes weren’t the only ones hostile to the black recruits.

As he tells Manchester Journal staff writer Brandon Canevari, “The whites were suspicious of you…. And there was a point where if you wanted to go on liberty, you had to be escorted by a white officer.”

The indignities of racial segregation didn’t sway him from his goal: a college education via the GI Bill, and with it a better life.

that “I had made up my mind that no matter what the circumstances were, no matter how badly I was treated, no matter how badly I might have felt, I had a mission. And the mission was to go to college,” he says.

Listen to Nate Boone articulate his life mission for WCAX:

He tells the Rutland Herald that “I had made up my mind that I was going to take whatever the South gave me. Whatever the Marine Corps gave me I would endure, because it meant so much to get to college.”

It was a risk-reward gambit Boone knew would turn out right.

“I don’t regret any moment of it because of the fact that it allowed me to do what I wanted to do,” he said.

At �ֲ���ý, he met his wife, Harriet Howell Boone ’52. (Nate and Harriet’s daughter Daryl ’82 is an alumna, as is Nate’s brother David ’62; his wife, Carol Huntington Boone ’63; and their daughter Karin ’87.)

Marine Col. Stephanie Smith ’87 poses with her father, Ernest Smith Jr., and Gen. John Amos, commandant of the Marine Corps. Photograph by Aimee Smith-Bywater.

�ֲ���ý has yet another connection to Montford Point in Marine Col. Stephanie Smith ’87. Her father is a Montford Point Marine, and she is collecting oral histories of the veterans in her capacity as a special project officer for the Montford Point Project.

• View CNN highlights of the Congressional Gold Medal ceremony.

Charlie Schroeder '95 has penned Man of War: My Adventures in the World of Historical Reenactment.

The Washington Post and other reviewers say Man of War by Charlie Schroeder ’95 offers entertaining insights into the lives of war reenactors.

During a year spent with various reenactment groups, Schroeder, a �ֲ���ý theater major, played a German soldier fighting the Soviets at Stalingrad (in Colorado). He lived in a Roman fort and battled Celts (in Arkansas) and experienced the Vietnam War (in Virginia). There were stints in the French and Indian War, and the Civil War. And he was a Viking, too.

Writes Timothy R. Smith in :

“Schroeder…got into reenacting because he longed for history. He grew up in an 18th-century log cabin in Mennonite country, where history abounded, but he didn’t notice it. In L.A., though, where history lasts about 12 seconds, he started to miss the past. After touring a living history program in Southern California, he had an idea: ‘What if I could reenact my way through history? To learn not only about the hobby but maybe, just maybe, about the past too?'”

But the book isn’t all earnestness, as Smith and others point out.

Barton Swaim of says it’s worth the price of the book just to read the part about the Colorado ranch owner, a Vietnam vet no less, who doesn’t want ersatz Nazis taking on faux Soviets on land adjoining his, which prompts a young reenactor to mutter, “Leave it to a dumb redneck to ruin it for everybody.”

U.S. Marine Col. Stephanie Smith '87

The Detroit Free Press quotes Marine Col. Stephanie Smith ’87 in a recently honored with the Congressional Gold Medal, America’s highest civilian award.

Smith’s father, Ernest Smith Jr., was one of those pioneering World War II Marines who trained at segregated Montford Point at Camp Lejeune, N.C., from 1942 to 1949.

Free Press writer Joe Swickard writes that the Montford Point Marines “endured…the demeaning belief that they didn’t have the guts, character and discipline to defend their country in combat.”

Yet they served in World War II with distinction, albeit “mainly relegated to service battalions” where they “put their lives on the line…while being strafed, sniped, bombed and blasted as the Marines island-hopped through the Pacific toward Japan.”

Ernest Smith Jr., a former Montford Point Marine, is the father of Marine Col. Stephanie Smith '87. This portrait was taken in August 2011 during the 69th anniversary of the opening of the segregated Montford Point training facility. U.S. Marine Corps photo by Sgt. Alvin Williams.

Now in their 80s and 90s, fewer than 300 of the original 20,000 Montford Point Marines are still alive, including Smith’s father.

Stephanie Smith, who oversees the Montford Point Project at the Pentagon, tells the Free Press that the Congressional Gold Medal should help put the Montford Marines’ story in its rightful place in Corps history.

“Their courage, perseverance and self-sacrifice” needs to be honored, she said. “These men fought and died for their country.”

The award, Swickard writes, ensures that the Montford story will “become part of the legacy instilled in every recruit going through boot camp.”

Smith recently concluded a two-year appointment as commanding officer of the Headquarters and Service Battalion for the Marine Corps Recruit Depot in San Diego, Calif. There, she commanded nearly 700 marines, sailors and civilians, receiving the Legion of Merit for her service.

In 2007, she received an outstanding lawyer award from the Judge Advocates Association as well as the Career Judge Advocate Award from the American Bar Association’s Career Judge Advocate Award.

As a positive example, reporter Ali Latifi offers the , for which Basij-Rasikh serves on the board of advisors (his sister Shabana, a senior at Middlebury College, is the organization’s executive director).

Basij-Rasikh tells Latifi that the millions of Afghans under the age of 25 need someone to tell them “you’re Afghan, you’re young, you have this potential. Now get up and do something” for your country.

At �ֲ���ý, Basij-Rasikh won a to support his project to empower people disabled by land mines in Afghanistan.

The disempowerment of the youth of Afghanistan is a product of the on-going conflict, Basij-Rasikh says, adding that it’s crucial that young Afghan leaders who grew up in conflict be the ones to tell other young people of Afghanistan “that people can bring change on a very small scale” regardless of their position in society or their place in the political structure.

That was seven months ago. Or, as Cummings might say, 319,000 free throws ago.

Cummings, of Epsom, N.H., is on a quest to make one million basketball free throws, his way of expressing support for U.S. military personnel. Specifically, he’s raising awareness and money for the for injured veterans.

As of May 9, Cummings and his is at 779,507. But who’s counting? Well, everyone’s counting.

Cummings (whose father is 1,000-point �ֲ���ý scorer Seth Cummings ’65 and mother is Linda Cummings Messer ’65) has made free throws in his driveway in all kinds of weather and in dozens of gyms on the U.S. mainland and on Nantucket.

He’s been interviewed by print, TV and radio news outlets, tossed free throws on the set of the Mike Huckabee TV show and on the TD Garden’s famed parquet floor , and got jockeys’ help while tossing free throws at Saratoga Race Course.

Cummings has made an average of 1,370 free throws per day since launching the Hoops For Heroes initiative on Veterans Day 2009. His plan is to sink the millionth on Veterans Day at the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass.

In March, he made his 700,000th as a guest member of the Washington Generals, the foils of the Harlem Globetrotters. After missing the first of two foul shots, “Big Easy” Lofton handed Cummings the ball, saying, “Don’t be nervous. Everybody’s watching.”

Lofton then deployed an ageless Globetrotter gag, giving Cummings a wedgie. As , “I readjusted the wedgie, dribbled twice, heard the announcer say, ‘For 700,000 made…’ and then floated one in. And that was it. To the bench I went.”

Explaining to USA Today how he got started, Cummings says that a line from President Obama’s inauguration speech hit him hard: “As much as government can do and must do, it is ultimately the faith and determination of the American people upon which this nation relies.”

Three nights later, Cummings said this his video camera, “Tonight, I’m gonna start making some foul shots. I hope I can make a million of them and raise some money for the people overseas fighting for us. … I’m sorry I haven’t been able to do more in my life, but I think it’s time to do something. So I’m going to start.”

Stories:

The Portland Press Herald reviews A Rope and a Prayer, the book by David Rohde ’89 that tells of his capture by the Taliban in Afghanistan in November 2008. The harrowing story begins when a Taliban commander proffers an interview invitation to Rohde, a New York Times correspondent. “I knew meeting with the Taliban was perilous,” Rohde writes. But he told himself “not to be a coward, that the interview is a risk worth taking…. Many other journalists have done the same thing.”

But Rohde and his companions are captured, beginning seven months of captivity during which their captors demand a $5-million ransom and the release of Taliban prisoners. The book, co-written by Rohde’s wife, Kristen Mulvihill, also illuminates U.S. efforts to free the captives, with a domestic cast of characters including The New York Times legal counsel, the FBI, an Irish national with Taliban contacts, Hillary Clinton, Gen. David Petraeus and the late diplomat Richard Holbrooke.

Rohde eventually escaped on foot. A member of the �ֲ���ý Class of 1989, Rohde completed his studies at Brown University.

Catherine Winne '41 poses in front of a Piper Cub in November 1940. Winne is believed to be the only �ֲ���ý woman who learned to fly through the Civilian Pilot Training Program. Photograph courtesy of the Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library.

From high in the sky, Maine looks like “a land of lakes, all within a stone’s throw of each other,” wrote Catherine Winne ’41 in the Oct. 30, 1940, issue of The �ֲ���ý Student following her pilot training flight.

Winne is believed to be the only �ֲ���ý woman who learned to fly through the government-sponsored Civilian Pilot Training Program. She’s seen here in November 1940 standing in front of the program’s training plane, a two-seat Piper Cub, at what is now the Auburn-Lewiston Municipal Airport.

“We knew it was a pre-screening thing for military pilots.”

Begun in 1938 to increase the number of civilian U.S. pilots, the CPTP gave flight training to hundreds of thousands of men and women, mostly college students. The program is specifically credited with creating a path for African Americans to eventually become military pilots, notably the Tuskegee Airmen. �ֲ���ý, Bowdoin, Colby, and UMaine offered chapters in Maine, as did several high schools and American Legion chapters.

Women were given 10 percent of the slots, which meant two spots among 20 at �ֲ���ý, though they were excluded after the U.S. joined World War II. Winne, who died in 2007, was one female �ֲ���ý trainee; the late Pauline Giles ’41 attended classroom sessions but it is unclear if she ever flew.

The CPTP’s military importance was readily known, especially after Germany invaded Poland and France. “We knew it was a pre-screening thing for military pilots,” says retired Marine Col. Armand Daddazio ’42, who was a CPTP trainee as a �ֲ���ý student. After graduating, Daddazio saw active duty in air defense artillery in the Pacific.

He was on Tinian when the USS Indianapolis delivered the atomic bomb destined for Hiroshima. “Headquarters called to ask for officers for a work party,” Daddazio recalls. “We pointed out that officers don’t go on work parties. The reply was, ‘Well, they do on this one!’ For security, they wanted officers to unload the bomb.”

Now living in El Paso, Texas, after a career in financial services, Daddazio did not fly during or after the war. Initially interested in the Army Air Corps, he instead chose the Marines. “The casualty rate ended up pretty bad for the flying services,” he recalls. “Maybe the dear Lord didn’t want me to fly.” — HJB