The Waging Peace in Vietnam Exhibit

Ron Carver is a longtime photographer, social justice, and labor rights activist with roots in the American civil rights and anti-war movements of the 1960s. In October 2016, Carver traveled to Vietnam to document Project Renew, which was started by the American war veteran Chuck Searcy to clear unexploded ordnance that still poses lethal danger in Quang Tri Province.

During the trip Carver visited Vietnam’s War Remnants Museum and met the director, Ms. Huynh Ngoc Van, to present her with Dr. Spock on Vietnam, a book written by the pediatrician and outspoken critic of the war, Benjamin Spock, with Mitchell Zimmerman.

Ms. Van was interested to hear that Carver worked with the United States Servicemen’s Fund from 1969 to 1971, helping to set up coffeehouses in Army towns where soldiers would meet to write antiwar newspapers to smuggle onto the bases. Ms. Van indicated she had always wanted to mount an exhibit about the GI antiwar movement and asked Carver to guest-curate an exhibit about the U.S. soldiers and veterans who opposed the war.

The exhibit opened at the museum on March 19, 2018.

The Companion Book

At an event on December 4, 2018, Carver met Lynne Elizabeth, director of New Village Press, a publishing house affiliated with New York University Press.

Upon hearing that he was planning a North American tour of the Waging Peace in Vietnam exhibit, Ms. Elizabeth urged Carver to write a companion book and promised to include it in the New Village Press catalog in time for the Fall 2019 launch of the exhibit’s tour.

Carver partnered with Barbara Doherty, an independent writer and editor, to be the book’s co- editor, along with David Cortright, Notre Dame professor and author of Soldiers in Revolt, a seminal study of the GI Movement. They received permission to use material from Willa Seidenberg and William Smart’s A Matter of Conscience, the catalog from an exhibit at the Addison Gallery of American Art.

Waging Peace in Vietnam: US Soldiers and Veterans Who Opposed the War features first-hand accounts, oral histories, posters, flyers, photographs, material from the U.S. National Archives and underground newspapers from the Wisconsin Historical Society’s GI Press Collection, plus fourteen new essays by leading scholars and activists and poems by five American veterans of the war. The companion book was published in September 2019 simultaneously by New Village Press in New York and the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City.

The Full Story

Ron Carver was interviewed by Talk Vietnam in a wide ranging discussion as much about the significance of the GI peace movement as his sixty year history of human rights activism and how he came to create the Waging Peace in Vietnam exhibit and companion book.