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Episode 2602 of the Vietnam Veteran News Podcast will a review of the recently published book titled; Duty to Serve, Duty to Conscience, The Story of Two Conscientious Objector Combat Medics during the Vietnam War and interview the authors James C. Kearney and William H Clamurro.

The interview will be conducted by a good friend of this podcast, Andy Pham. He will interview James C. Kearney and William H Clamurro, two very unusual Vietnam Veterans. They were both conscientious objectors who served as combat medics in Vietnam, one of the most dangerous tasks in the Vietnam War.

They co-authored the book Duty to Serve, Duty to Conscience to describe the dichotomy they faced in the War. The description of their book includes the following:

Despite all that has been written about Vietnam, the story of the 1-A-O conscientious objector, who agreed to put on a uniform and serve in the field without weapons rather than accept alternative service outside the military, has received scarce attention. This joint memoir by two 1-A-O combat medics, James C. Kearney and William H. Clamurro, represents a unique approach to the subject. It is a blend of their personal narratives with select Vietnam poems by Clamurro to illustrate noncombatant objection as a unique and relatively unknown form of Vietnam War protest.

Because of their status as “a new breed of conscientious objector” i.e., more political than religious in their convictions the authors’ experience of the Vietnam War differed fundamentally from that of their fellow draftees and contrasted even with the great majority of their fellow 1-A-O medics, whose conscientious objector status was largely or entirely faith-based.

JAMES C. KEARNEY received both his undergraduate and graduate degrees from the University of Texas at Austin, where he now teaches. Kearney is the author of Nassau Plantation and No Hope for Heaven, No Fear of Hell (both UNT Press). WILLIAM H. CLAMURRO is professor emeritus of Spanish at Emporia State University in Kansas. He is the author of The Vietnam Typescript, a book of poetry.

Listen to episode 2602 and discover more about the recently published book titled; Duty to Serve, Duty to Conscience, The Story of Two Conscientious Objector Combat Medics during the Vietnam War By James C. Kearney and William H Clamurro.