Vietnam Vet/Author: Edward F. Palm

Ed Palm

About the Author

A native of New Castle, Delaware, Edward F. Palm served in Vietnam as an enlisted man with the Marine Corps’ Combined Action Program. He earned his Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania with a dissertation on the moral vision of selected Vietnam novels and has since published and presented on various aspects of American culture as well as imaginative representations of the American experience in Vietnam.

Returning to the Marine Corps in later life, Palm became an officer and taught military affairs at the University of California, Berkeley, and English at the United States Naval Academy before retiring as a major in 1993.

He went on to serve as a tenured professor and division chair at Glenville State College (in West Virginia) and has held dean appointments at Maryville University of St. Louis and Olympic College, in Bremerton, Washington. He has also taught full-time online for Strayer University.

Now retired, Palm devotes his time to photography and writing, including a regular opinion column for his local newspaper, the Kitsap Sun. Palm’s full CV is available at www.EdwardFPalm.com.

Through no fault of his own, Palm now makes his home about as far from Delaware as one can get and still be in the contiguous United States—in Bremerton, Washington.

Edward's Books:

Lucky Eddie the Second: Or My Great Expectations 

About the Book:

"The best thing my father ever did for me, I now realize, was to disappear from my life when I was only two." 

Thus I begin my account of the complicated desultory relationship I had with my father, a career Air Force officer and pilot. --EFP

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An "American Pie": Lansdale, Lederer, Dooley, and Modern Memory 

About the Book:

In the wake of the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, three Americans came together in a clandestine alliance that would play a major role in establishing Vietnam as an important arena in the Cold-War contest for hearts and minds. The three were Edward Lansdale, the legendary CIA officer who had engineered the defeat of the Communist Huk rebellion in the Philippines; William Lederer, a Navy captain who, along with Eugene Burdick, would go on to coauthor "The Ugly American"; and Thomas Dooley, a Navy doctor who first rose to prominence with a book titled "Deliver Us from Evil" and who would later found Medico. Drawing on primary source material, this article establishes the extent of their alliance and their shared commitment to a non-military solution in Vietnam.

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The Annals of the Rod and God Club

About the Book:

This is the mostly true story of my experiences as a 7th and 8th grader in a Catholic school in the early sixties, when nuns were still drill instructors of the divine.

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The Fiction Behind the Fiction: Lederer, Burdick, and the Composition of "The Ugly American"

About the Book:

The story of the phenomenal success of "The Ugly American" is well known. Lederer and Burdick's novelistic indictment of American ineptitude, indifference, and self-indulgence abroad inspired President Eisenhower to form a commission charged with investigating our Foreign Service. It influenced then-Senator John F. Kennedy’s later decisions to found the Peace Corps and the Green Berets. What has not been appreciated until now is the extent to which Lederer and Burdick’s success rested on a carefully contrived myth surrounding the novel’s genesis and composition.

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“I am only one, but I am one. I can't do everything, but I can do something. The something I ought to do, I can do, and by the grace of God, I will.” ~Everett Hale