John Steinbeck magazine, Steinbeck went to Vietnam to report on the war. He thought of the Vietnam War as a heroic venture and was considered a hawk for his position on the war. His sons served in Vietnam before his death, and Steinbeck visited one son in the battlefield. At one point he was allowed to man a machine-gun watch position at night at a firebase while his son and other members of his platoon slept. In May 1948, Steinbeck returned to California on an emergency trip to be with his friend Ed Ricketts, who had been seriously injured when a train
John Steinbeck IV the tutelage of the politically powerful Coconut Monk, a silent tree-dwelling Buddhist yogi who adopted Steinbeck as a spiritual son. Amid the raging war, Steinbeck stayed in the monk's "peace zone", where the 400 monks who lived on the island hammered howitzer shell casings into bells. While in Saigon, Steinbeck participated in Michael Rubbo's 1970 documentary film "Sad Song of Yellow Skin", as part of a group of young American journalists practicing a New Journalism approach to covering the war. Steinbeck traveled back and forth between Asia and the United States several more times before settling in Boulder, Colorado, where