Co-Founder, Veterans for Peace

Doug Rawlings was drafted out of Ohio State University Graduate School in the Fall of 1968. He was subsequently sent to Viet Nam in July of 1969, as a member of the 7/15th artillery, to support the 173rd Airborne in the Central Highlands. He is one of the five co-founders of Veterans For Peace (1985) and has taught English at the high school level and writing at the university level. Before retiring from the University of Maine at Farmington, he developed and taught a course on Peace Studies that featured Staughton and Alice Lynd’s seminal text, A History of Nonviolence in America. He lives in rural Maine, still working to abolish war as best he can. He has published six collections of poetry and three collections of Letters to The Wall, letters written by anyone “directly impacted by the American war in Vietnam.” All 500 letters were delivered to the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C., over the span of five years. We delivered them on Memorial Day.