Faith of Our Sons: A Father's Wartime Diary - Softcover

Schaeffer, Frank

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0786715855 ISBN 13: 9780786715855

Publisher: Da Capo Press, 2005

Synopsis

In 1998, novelist Frank Schaeffer's eighteen-year-old son John joined the Marines straight out of prep school. Their ensuing journey, recounted in the bestselling Keeping Faith: A Father-Son Story About Love and the United States Marine Corps, struck a fervent chord amongst the many Americans with a family member in the military. In Faith of Our Sons, Frank Schaeffer picks up his family's ongoing story as Corporal John Schaeffer is deployed to the Middle East on the day Gulf War II begins. Schaeffer's moving and timely account of the universal experience of losing a child— either temporarily or permanently—to war and his attendant emotions (from pride to panic to rage and back again) is punctuated throughout by the voices of the many others in Frank's situation, thousands of parents and children, who continue to pour their hearts out to the Schaeffers in countless letters since the publication of Keeping Faith—from those waiting anxiously for loved ones to come home to those who know they never will. No other book addresses the more intimate, but in some ways just as difficult and heroic side of the wartime experience: that of those waiting at home, praying for the safety of their loved ones.

About this title

From Publishers Weekly:

In this follow-up to Keeping Faith: A Father-Son Story About Love and the United States Marine Corps (2002), which Schaeffer coauthored with his son, Corporal John Schaeffer, Frank and his wife confront the reality of their son’s deployment to Iraq in February 2003. Although the third sentence of this "Diary of Deployment" is "I’m elated for my boy because he sounds happy," the fourth is "I’m elated in the same way one is ‘elated’ by looking over a cliff." Over the ensuing months, Frank and Genie work to calm their nerves, get and share information from and with other parents, and help parents whose children are killed in battle cope with their losses—some of whose letters are included here, as are letters from John, who returns to his U.S. base safely in December. Schaeffer is unflinching in recounting day-to-day dreams, fears and coping mechanisms, and in registering his own, and others’, reactions to the politics of the war. Although most parents of soldiers don’t write Op-Eds for the Washington Post or appear on Oprah, Schaeffer is careful to try to give voice to "ordinary" parents and soldiers from all branches of the service, and that care is what makes this volume a valuable resource for other parents of military personal.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review:

"Dramatic and laugh-out-loud funny, beautifully written and deftly constructed, deeply affecting in its honest portrayal of the author's passions: a stunning achievement."

About this edition

• Publisher: Da Capo Press
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0786715855
• ISBN 13: 9780786715855
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288