Father, Soldier, Son

Father, Soldier, Son will stand as one of the finest soldier memoirs of the Vietnam War . . . If all that has been written about the war in Vietnam, in fiction and nonfiction, has made it a familiar story to some, Tripp overcomes clich by individualizing every well-known fact. -- The Boston GlobeNATHANIEL TRIPP GREW UP fatherless in a house full of women and he arrived in Vietnam as a just-promoted second lieutenant in the summer of 1968 with no memory of a mans example to guide and sustain him. The father missing from Tripps life had gone off to war as well, in the Navy in World War II, but the terrors were too much for him, he disgraced himself, and after the war ended he could not bring himself to return to his wife and young son. In some of the best prose this side of Tim OBrien or Tobias Wolff (Military History Quarterly), Tripp tells of how he learned as a platoon leader to become something of a father to the men in his care, how he came to understand the strange trajectory of his own mentally unbalanced fathers life, and how the lessons he learned under fire helped him in the raising of his own sons.Not since Michael Herrs Dispatches has there been anything quite as vivid, gripping and soul-searing, raved the Washington Post, and the Chicago Tribune said the description of combat in the jungles of Vietnam are authentic and terrifying, as good as any I have read in fact or fiction.