The exhibit was next showcased at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst which also hosted events, including an opening forum featuring Vietnam Veteran poet W.D. Ehrhart and a later forum focused on moral injury of soldiers.
The exhibit and events were sponsored by the Department of History; the Program in Public History; the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures; the Program in Comparative Literature; the Writing Program, the Massachusetts Review; Special Collections and University Archives; and the College of Humanities and Fine Arts.
A second forum, Moral Injury and The Traumas of War, included Khary Polk, Amherst College professor (Moderator); Doug Anderson, poet and former Vietnam war combat medic; Ross Caputi, Iraq War veteran and UMass history PhD candidate; Robert Meagher, Hampshire College professor and an expert on the traumas of war and author of Killing from the Inside Out: Moral Injury and Just War; Karen Skolfield, Army veteran and poet; and Wayne Smith, activist and former Vietnam war combat medic.
Panel Discussion: Moral Injury and The Traumas of War
Exhibit coordinators included comparative literature professors Moira Inghilleri and Jim Hicks. The project was spearheaded by History Professor Chris Appy, who wrote the afterword for the companion book.
Panel Discussion: Patriotic Dissent
Co-Sponsors
The panel discussions and film screenings of Eugene Jarecki’s 2005 documentary Why We Fight and Miles Lagoze’s 2018 documentary Combat Obscura including a Q&A with the director were co-sponsored by:
The Department of History
The Program in Comparative Literature
The Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures
The Writing Program
Special Collections and University Archives
The College of Humanities and Fine Arts
The Institute for Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies
Docents
An innovative and successful initiative running concurrently with the exhibit was a class, created by the History and Comparative Literature departments, to train docents for twice- weekly tours of the exhibit. An article by Jason A. Higgins, a PhD candidate at the University of Massachusetts and the director of the Incarcerated Veterans project, describes the success of this project.