Hitchhiking from Vietnam: Seeking the Ox
We’ll travel from somewhere rather than to a destination when local author Richard Chamberlin speaks to us on Monday February 27. He is the author of Hitchhiking from Vietnam: Seeking the Ox, an account of a Vietnam veteran’s meandering journey to fulfillment during the 60’s and 70’s, based on the cross-country hitchhiking trip the author took when he was 30 years old. The central part of the book is a series of flashbacks of Chamberlin’s experiences with the Navy’s Seabees in Vietnam.
Chamberlin enlisted in the Navy in 1966 to avoid the draft. He joined with a sense of pride, but after two deployments to Vietnam and a tour of duty on a submarine tender he left with a sense of disillusionment. His hitchhiking trip across the US became a spiritual quest and a framework for dealing internally with the “absurdities and paradoxes of that war.”
Richard Chamberlin has a BA in Journalism from Columbia College and has been a newspaper reporter, freelance writer, psychiatric nurse and cab driver. He has written articles on environmental and forestry issues for the Ishtmus and the journal Wild Earth. He edited the Union Cab newsletter for four years. His poetry was been featured as part of an art exhibit at the (then) Elvejem Museum in Madison and his short stories have been published in Mobius, and The Journal of Social Change.
