The Soldier Factory: A Window

A former soldier's poignant search for meaning in the American military experience.

When Ed Salven returned after thirty years to Fort Ord, where he was stationed in the late 1960s, he found a ghost town. The once bustling Sixth Army Infantry Processing Center in northern California sat in silent decay, and he was overwhelmed by recollections of his time there as a young draftee. Those memories became the basis for The Soldier Factory, a moving collection of meditations on being a part of the U.S. military machine at the height of the Vietnam War and on the essential questions Salven and his fellow soldiers confronted dealing with violence, authority, self-worth, honor, loss, and love.

Salven's reflections are accompanied by a series of paintingsvivid, anonymous portraits of soldiers. Fort Ord, once a community of more than 30,000 soldiers, was closed in the late 1990s; these paintings are now being used as window covers on several abandoned barracks. Also included are color photographs of the fort and the surrounding landscape in its strangely beautiful state today.

Veterans and soldiers alike will find this book particularly meaningful, as will anyone seeking to better understand this important period in U.S. history and its impact on those who lived through it. By turns amusing and heartbreaking, The Soldier Factory has the quiet, reverent quality of a memorial. Color illustrations throughout.

In July of 1968, at the age of 20, Salven, having been drafted, began his basic training at Fort Ord, on California's Monterey Bay. He served his time, returned to California, and opened his own landscaping business. He didn't return until more than 30 years later, after Fort Ord's closing in 1994. But when he did, the recollections came in cascades. Salven wrote down more than 80 of them, and they form the poetic core of this book. Hushed, vivid and digressive, and set in lines of verse, they read like a cross between Joe Brainard's I Remember and zen reportage. On a later trip back, Salven found a set of soldier portraits done in 1994, the year Fort Ord was closed, by local art students. They, along with photographs of the abandoned base that Salven took, form a moving semi-contemporary counterpoint to Salven's recollections. This book makes a unique contribution to the literature of Vietnam, and to contemporary debates about the American military. 50 color illustrations.
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