After you spend some time at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC, you may have new questions and ideas, thoughts that were not with you before. What are they?

This book, intended for college students in their first-year writing course, provides a collection of those ideas. The book contains no information about the Vietnam War; you can get that elsewhere. Rather, the book bombards you with ways to think about the Memorial. When you have those thoughts in your firm grasp, you can begin to express them, and yourself, with written words.

John Fiske teaches first year writing at several colleges in the Boston area.