John Lewallen

John Lewallen's new book, "Land of Frozen Laughter,"offers a unique in-depth view of life in the Vietnam War. Written in 1969, the raw experiences described changed his life.

Born November 14, 1942 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, John Lewallen graduated from Juneau High School, Alaska, in 1960, and earned a BA in political science from Whitman College, Walla Walla, Washington, in 1964.

From 1964 to ’65 he was a Fulbright Tutor in English at the University of Rajasthan, Jaipur, India. He lived in a Rajasthani village and wrote an unpublished study titled “Overall Development in a Rajasthani Village.”

In 1967, after completing one year in good standing at Stanford Law School in California, Lewallen dropped out and joined the International Voluntary Services, Inc., with a two-year contract to serve as a community development volunteer in South Vietnam.

Lewallen's two years in Vietnam at the height of the war transformed his life, making him a lifelong activist for peace conversion. Returning to his parents’ home in Yachats, Oregon, in 1969, Lewallen spent several months “debriefing” himself by writing "Land of Frozen Laughter."

In 1970 Lewallen moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, where he devoted himself to the antiwar and environmental movements. He wrote "Ecology of Devastation: Indochina" (Penguin Books, 1972), a study of the US military assault on the environments and peoples of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, which Penguin Books nominated for the 1972 Pulitzer Prize. That same year he organized a “Convention on Ecocidal War” at the alternative conference to the first United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm, Sweden, where Professor Richard Falk introduced a draft convention outlawing ecocidal warfare.

John moved to rural Mendocino County in 1978. There he pioneered an industry of independent hand-harvesters of wild edible seaweed. Lewallen is married to his partner in the Mendocino Sea Vegetable Company, Barbara Stephens-Lewallen. John is a founding member of Mendocino County Chapter 116 of Veterans for Peace. In 2001 he published "High-Altitude Nuclear War" to warn people about the dangers of nuclear electromagnetic pulse warfare and apocalyptic nuclear war, and the need to de-escalate the nuclear weapons confrontation involving the United States, Russia, and China.