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Looking forward to the day the cover of my investigative memoir, Because: A CIA Coverup and a Son’s Odyssey to Find the Father He Never Knew (see https://jamesbwells.com) will be added to these great reads published by Milspeak Books. 

In my investigative memoir about my whistleblower father’s still classified death in Vietnam, I  write about how, from my quest, I learned that peace requires forgiveness and forgiveness requires truth. After 33 years of research and writing, my confession, that is my satisfaction with the truth I exposed about my father’s life and death, will debut […]

At last night’s open-mic at the Luigart Cafe I explained the non-fiction literary craft technique “perhapsing” and gave an illustrative example based on the letters my 18-year-old father wrote my mother while on a troop ship heading to the Philippines to fight the Japanese in WWII.

This weekend I want to honor the sacrifices veterans like my father (on left) and his older brother Isaac (on right) gave. My mother often told me how much my teenage father worried about Isaac when he left home to fight the Japanese over a year earlier than my father did. In one letter to […]

At last night’s Bluegrass Writers Studio open-mic at Dreaming Creek Brewery, I read from a haibun I drafted based upon the remarkable 23 letters my 18-year-old father wrote my mother while attending advanced infantry training at Camp Blanding in the fall of 1944.

Fifty-eight years ago today, my father was killed in Vietnam. Ever since discovering over 400 of his letters over three decades ago, I’ve been conducting archival and field research across two continents and writing about what type of man he was and why he did the things he did. When trying to understand his actions, […]

They say a person dies twice — once when they have their physical death and the second time when we stop saying their name. Since you died over seventy-one years ago, odds are you were close to experiencing that second death if you hadn’t already. But today, over a hundred years after you gave my […]

At last night’s Bluegrass Writers Studio open-mic at Dreamin Creek Brewery, I knew I had to read an excerpt from my investigative memoir where my father writes my mother while nursing a beer at a café in Saigon in 1965. Despite his limited education and no formal training in writing, my father could make readers […]

Today’s CNN article about the JFK assassination discussing why the CIA has not released all it knows reminds me of my father’s death.  “It mostly boils down to not wanting to out confidential sources who are still alive, or might be alive, and protecting methods. The CIA says it will wait until people either die or can […]

September 9 is a day that I am always deep in thought of both my mother and father. I suspect it was one of their favorite days. On September 9, 1927, my mother was born. On September 9, 1944, my father enlisted in the Army at Fort Hayes, Columbus, Ohio. On September 9, 1945, my […]