SOURCE: Slocock, Caroline. “Winning Hearts and Minds: The 1st Casualty Press.” Journal of American Studies 16, no. 1 (April 1982): 107-17.

In the following essay, Slocock chronicles the origins and growth of 1st Casualty Press, which was founded to publish the work of Vietnam veterans.

In the early 1970s, a number of Vietnam veterans sought publication for a collection of veterans' creative writing which they felt could make an important contribution to a political understanding of the war in Indochina. However, efforts to find a commercial publisher for their anthology met with no success. Their conviction that this literature both deserved and could find a substantial audience led these writers to establish their own independent publisher for the literature of Vietnam veterans, the 1st [sic] Casualty Press.¹ In 1972, the Press published an anthology of veterans' poetry, Winning Hearts and Minds (or WHAM as it is often called), edited by Larry Rottmann...