Jan Barry

Jan Barry is a poet, author, educator and journalist based in New Jersey. Born Jan Barry Crumb on Jan. 26, 1943 in Ithaca, NY, he grew up in a rural village in the Finger Lakes where poets and writers were few and far between. As a kid he wanted a pony, to be cowboy with a nickname like "Dusty" and a pen name like Mark Twain, but couldn't come up with anything memorable enough to remember. So hence, Jan Barry.

After graduating from Interlaken Central School, he attended the New York State College of Forestry at Syracuse University, but dropped out to join the Army and see the world. Appointed to the U.S. Military Academy after an all-expenses-paid tour of war zones, bars, beaches, fishing boats, Saigon traffic, DaNang back alleys, drunken rides on motorbikes and madly racing cyclos on Nha Trang's dark beach road on the cusp of curfew, wild rides on Marine-piloted C-46s skimming the ocean, Air Force C-123s skimming tree tops, Canadian bush pilot planes flown by the Army in and out of holes in the jungle, with unmarked CIA "black ops" B-26 bombers and Korean War-era helicopters with a tendency to crash flitting around, all part of a slap-happy flying circus of gung-ho US military missions amid hostile South Vietnamese allies run 9-to-5 between "happy hours" at military clubs, seductive bar girls rumored to work for the Viet Cong, guard duty postings with unloaded rifles amid riled-up Vietnamese with loaded weapons, special missions behind enemy lines to deliver beer and other bizarre hazardous duty in Vietnam--did I mention the sexy Viet Cong girls?--he resigned from West Point to become a writer and peace activist.

A co-founder of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, his poems on the war appeared in diverse publications, from the Chicago Tribune and New York Times to A People and A Nation: A History of the United States. His poetry first appeared in Winning Hearts and Minds: War Poems by Vietnam Veterans, published by 1st Casualty Press, founded by Jan Barry and fellow veterans Larry Rottmann and Basil T. Paquet. With W.D. Ehrhart, he compiled a sequel, Demilitarized Zones: Veterans After Vietnam. Marshaling writers and artists confronting the threat of nuclear war, he also edited Peace Is Our Profession: Poems and Passages of War Protest.

Three decades after dropping out of school to become a teenage soldier, he graduated from Ramapo College of New Jersey with a degree in political science, much of it studied first-hand in Vietnamese affairs, citizen exchange liaisons in the Soviet Union, and close encounters with every level of government in America. Profiled in Choosing Sides: I Remember Vietnam (Cronkite Productions, 1998), aired on The History Channel, he's presented poetry readings and observations on the tangled web of historic and current events at numerous colleges, high schools, elementary schools and community forums.

Most recently, he's featured in the 2011 HBO documentary Mann v. Ford as a lead reporter for the "Toxic Legacy" series published by The Record (Bergen Co., NJ) that revealed the extent of industrial contamination and health problems in a suburban community and along water supply streams in New Jersey and New York.

In a journalism career that began with a boyhood newspaper route, included a stint at CBS News doing research for radio and televison reports, and spanned four decades of writing for weeklies, dailies and national news publications, he's shared newshound tips at journalists' workshops and in teaching journalism courses. He is a recipient of several journalism awards, mainly for persistence, including a Community Service Award from the Society of the Silurians, the oldest press club in the United States. He was a member of an investigative project team at The Record that received a Grantham Prize for Excellence in Reporting on the Environment; the IRE Medal, the Investigative Reporters and Editors' top award; the Society of Professional Journalists' Sigma Delta Chi Award for investigative reporting; and the New Jersey Press Association's public service award.

Facing the prospect of being a card-carrying senior citizen without having expounded on the meaning of life, he's the author of A Citizen's Guide to Grassroots Campaigns, Earth Songs: New & Selected Poems, Life After War & Other Poems, and commentaries posted on Internet web sites.

Visiting Taughannock Falls near where I grew up in the Finger lakes region of New York. I attended a two-room country school up the road from the falls in Jacksonville, NY until 4th grade when we moved to a larger village, Interlaken (pop. 700), with a high school.