Peter P. Mahoney was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1948. He grew up in the suburbs of Long Island and studied to be a priest for three years. In 1968, he dropped out of college and joined the Army. After Officer Candidate School and Jump School, he was sent to Vietnam as an Infantry Lieutenant, and served for eleven months and twenty-two days. He was awarded the Combat Infantryman’s Badge, the Bronze Star, and the Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry.
Soon after returning to the States and being discharged from the Army, he joined the organization Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), and in 1972, he was elected as one of six National Coordinators for the organization. In July of 1972, he was indicted along with seven other members of VVAW by a federal grand jury for conspiracy to incite a riot at the Republican convention, the so-called Gainesville Eight case. After a four-week trial in 1973 – during which one of Mahoney’s best friends surfaced as an FBI informer who testified against him – all eight were found not guilty.
The rest of the decade of the seventies and early eighties, Mahoney held a series of pay-the-rent jobs such as street vendor, waiter, moving man and pari-mutuel clerk, while pursuing various non-paying activities such as poet, playwright, actor, and editor of a community newspaper. During this time, he attended seven different colleges and universities, but managed not to graduate from any of them.
In 1983, he was chosen to be the Deputy Director of the New York City Vietnam Veterans Memorial Commission, which raised private funds to build a memorial for Vietnam-era veterans in New York City. As part of this effort, he worked with a team on the commission to collect and sort through over three thousand letters written to and from soldiers in Vietnam, most of which came in through a call for letters by the New York Times in an article written by David Dunlap. These letters resulted in a book called Dear America: Letters Home From Vietnam, published by W.W. Norton, and an HBO documentary based on the letters, released theatrically in 1987, which won two Emmys, a Peabody, and several other accolades. It’s been viewed by more than 70 million people. The memorial was engraved with excerpts from the letters and built on Vietnam Veterans Plaza at 55 Water Street in New York City. The opening of the memorial and a ticker tape parade on Broadway for Vietnam veterans took place in 1985.
After the commission, Mahoney spent two years as an investment banker, his Wall Street career ending with the market crash in 1987. After four years as Director of Administration for the Institute for East-West Security Studies, a foreign policy research center, Mahoney embarked on a career in international development, working in various countries such as Russia, Ukraine, Haiti, Phillipines, Nigeria, and South Africa for NGOs over a period of twenty-nine years before retiring in 2022.
He is married with two children, and lives in Warren, Vermont.
On the book Dear America, Mahoney was responsible for organizing the collection of the letters, receiving the appropriate permissions to use the letters, and verifying the personal information of the letter writers. In addition, Mahoney worked closely with the book’s editor Bernard Edelman to shape the final manuscript, drafted the Glossary of Terms, and was one of the principal spokesmen for the book’s publicity tour, including an appearance on The Today Show on April 29 1985. Mahoney has published an Op-Ed in The New York Times on January 9 1974 called “Calley and That Old Bitterness,” and an article in The New York Times Magazine on June 11 1989 called “The Wounds of Two Wars.” Mahoney has four poems included in the anthology Demilitarized Zones: Veterans After Vietnam, edited by Jan Barry and W.D. Ehrhart, published in 1976.
pmahoney444@gmail.com
I Was A Hero Once 