The Kohima Educational Trust is delighted to welcome our guest speakers E.R. (Emily) Lutken with David Lutken to our next webinar on Thursday 15th May at 8pm - introduced by KET trustee Dr Robert Lyman.
Sabotage, surprise attacks, intelligence gathering, encounters with tigers, rafting uncharted rivers, tribal feasts and ceremonies, the terrible plight of countless refugees, and heroic as well as tragic events of the Second World War in Burma. In this presentation, the author’s son and daughter, David Lutken and E.R. (Emily) Lutken, give an overview of their father’s experiences as related in his memoir A Thousand Places Left Behind: One Soldier’s Account of Jungle Warfare in WWII Burma (Univ. Press of Mississippi, 2023).
Peter K. Lutken, Jr. (1920-2014) joined the U. S. Army in 1941, was assigned to the Coast Artillery and sent to Assam to guard airfields. He was soon reassigned to the British V Force, and later, the American Office of Strategic Services (the OSS), after he volunteered for reconnaissance missions behind Japanese lines.
We'll hear how he walked into Burma from neighbouring Assam, learned the Kachin language, lived among and fought alongside the Kachins for over two years — a detailed and compelling account of his time in the V Force and in the OSS, gathering intelligence and engaging in guerrilla operations in Japanese-occupied territory in the crucial China Burma India (CBI) Theatre in 1943-1945.
Many years after the war Pete and other veterans of OSS Detachment 101 participated in efforts to help the Kachin people who had assisted them — and the Allied effort — so much during the war years. Pete took several trips back to Burma beginning in the 1990s to work again with his lifelong friends and their descendants. His beloved 'Project Old Soldier', an agricultural cooperative based in Kutkai, endured up until the current conflict.
We’ll hear details about Pete’s wartime experience, as well as an introduction to the ‘making’ of the book, readings of excerpts, and a Q&A with Emily, an award-winning poet, and David, a stage actor.
To book your place on this webinar on Thursday 15th May at 8pm, please click the button below:
Speakers:
Dr Robert Lyman MBE - Military Historian, Author and Trustee of KET Born in New Zealand in January 1963 and educated in Australia, Robert Lyman was, for twenty years, an officer in the British Army. Educated at Scotch College, Melbourne he was commissioned into the Light Infantry from the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, in April 1982. In addition to a business career he is an author and military historian, publishing books in particular on the war in the Far East. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Robert is married to Hannah, has two sons, and lives in Berkshire. For information about Robert's publications please visit his website: robertlyman.com
E.R. (Emily) Lutken: E. R. Lutken’s collection Manifold: poetry of mathematics (3: A Taos Press, 2021) won the New Mexico First Book Award 2022. She is a family physician by training and worked for the majority of her career on the Navajo Nation. After retiring, she taught middle and high school science and mathematics in rural Colorado for several more years. Now she spends time reading and writing, and fishing in the swamps of Louisiana and mountain streams of New Mexico. https://www.erlutkenpoetry.com/
David M Lutken: An actor and musician originally from Dallas, Texas, David received a B.A. in Classical Studies from Duke University, and his post-graduate Acting degree from the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Arts in London. “A Thousand Places Left Behind” is his first audiobook recording.
He has performed on Broadway, at Ford’s Theater, The American Repertory Theatre, Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, The Public Theatre, Cooper Union, The 92nd St Y, at the Edinburgh Fringe, The Arts Theatre in London, The Olympic Arts Festival in Los Angeles, on the BBC, Deutschlandradio-Berlin, ORF-Vienna, Polskie Radio Troika-Warsaw, NPR, WSM in Nashville, The Voice of America, and on The Louisiana Hayride.
His musical, “Woody Sez: The Life & Music of Woody Guthrie”, devised with Nick Corley, Darcie Deaville, Helen Russell, and Andy Teirstein, has toured Europe, the UK, the US, the Middle East and China - (woodysez.com).
Sylvia May - Managing Trustee of The Kohima Educational Trust Sylvia May was born in New Jersey, USA in 1957. Her parents moved to England in 1963. Educated at High Wycombe School for Girls, she decided to pursue a career in the world of books. Sylvia worked for HarperCollins for 37 years, the last eleven of which she headed up their UK-based International Sales team. Sylvia May is the daughter of the late Gordon Graham, Founder and President of the Kohima Educational Trust. She is proud that her father has inspired many people to share his vision to commemorate those who fought and died in Kohima, and the wonderful Naga people who have done so much for the British in the past. She first visited India in 1994 with her husband Robert, and has returned on numerous occasions, staying in Kohima several times. In 2000, they followed the WWII route of the Queen's Own Cameron Highlanders, her father’s regiment. The regiment’s first main engagement in this theatre of war was at Zubza shortly before the Battle of Kohima.
