What Had to be Done/What Has to be Said by Joe Moran is dedicated to the author’s great uncle, a WWI combat medic who died at the age of 21 in the Battle of the Somme. It is the young that bear the brunt of every war.
By virtue of the author’s training something had to be done, by virtue of his witness something has to be said. This book is about those things. It is foremost a memoir of the author’s time in the War on Vietnam as a young combat medic. The book was precipitated by a flashback experience, a vivid memory of an event that took place in August 1969. At that time he realized that War on Vietnam was still inside him waiting to be told. Within it he shares experiences and observations that remain fresh about a war that was both tragic and unnecesary. A war that resulted from faulty assumptions and misguided tactics. He speaks about the medic and corpsman role as being the interface between life and death and knowing this is their special burden. He shares his metamorphosis in thinking about the war and realization that in his role as a life saver he was in effect preserving soldiers’ lives so they might kill or be killed on another day.
Monday, June 22, 2026 6pm, Unitarian Church on Glendale Ave., Toledo Ohio
Free and open to the public.