Year-End Update: Revisiting Scenes and People From 1986 View Stories : Reflections of Vietnam

View has revisited some of the people and places it reported on in 1986 to update their stories. Among them:

--A shelter for the homeless that was itself homeless.

--An author who had new ideas about how to market and promote his book.

--The campaign to save Nancy Reagan’s 1981 inaugural gown, which is stretching under the weight of its bugle beads.

An uncomplicated, homespun, yet enormously successful magazine mirroring the men and moments of the Vietnam war has become a casualty. Of its own innocence, even of its own ranks.

One member of the magazine’s production team, says Reflections originator-publisher Jerry Osgood of Chanhassen, Minn., has skipped town with most of the profits of the first issue. “About $12,000,” Osgood said, “and enough to have put out the second issue.”

The Domino Effect was a funding skirmish between Osgood and his printing house: “So they are holding 30,000 copies of the second issue. I’ve spoken to an attorney, and rather than spend the next three months in court, we might go with another printer, change the name of the magazine from Reflections to Reflecting, and get around the problem that way.”

But, insisted Osgood, a second issue of the little magazine that could, which was the subject of a View story in May, will most certainly hit the streets. It will be sold nationwide through B. Dalton Bookseller, and the format of Reflections/Reflecting will remain that of a bulletin board, a place where Vietnam veterans may pin their memories.

Osgood, a veteran of Vietnam service with the 25th Infantry Division at Tay Ninh, developed the magazine not as a combat journal nor as therapy through the printed word, but as a yearbook for all the classes of ’62 through ’72.

“I’m looking at the typical guy doing his 365 days loading a forklift in mud and rain in 110-degree heat,” went Osgood’s original policy statement. “I’m looking at the ordinary GI who waded through a swamp at dusk to set up for a night ambush. I’m looking at your normal helicopter pilot going into openings too small for a chopper unless you were crazy.”

The magazine found them. In April, the first hesitant issue, combining short stories, small poems and quiet tributes, sold all 20,000 copies, at $2.95 each, in four days through bookstores in the Minnesota area. Demand swelled for wider distribution and a second run of 100,000. Publicity was multimedia, large and national.

Now the promise has dimmed, and what was planned as a quarterly will finish its first year as a biannual. “But we’re still aiming at being quarterly for 1987,” Osgood said. “I feel bad about the delay, I feel frustrated by knowing the second issue is sitting there doing nothing. But the lessons have been learned the hard way; now we’re doing it the right way with the right people.

“Like the war, this has just dragged on with moderate casualties.”