The Moral Life of Soldiers: A novel and five stories - Softcover

Gold, Jerome

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1936364026 ISBN 13: 9781936364022

Publisher: Black Heron Press, 2013

Synopsis

The Moral Life of Soldiers

About this title

From the Author:

Jerome Gold is the author of thirteen books, including the fiction collection, The Moral Life of Soldiers, and Paranoia & Heartbreak, a memoir of the years he spent as a rehabilitation counselor in a prison for children. He lives in Seattle, Washington.

Review:

This introspective...collection, made up of four stories, a novella, and a short novel, comes from Gold (Sergeant Dickinson), who served in Vietnam with the Special Forces. The novella, "Paul's Father," introduces Paul Donaldson, who appears throughout the collection. During the 1950s, Paul's father Herb moves his family from Chicago to segregated Georgia. After trying to buy a car for his black cook, Herb is run out of town. The family relocates to California and Paul never forgives his father for refusing to stand up for himself, setting the stage for the rest of the collection. The short story quartet fleshes out Paul's adolescence in the California desert, where he gets into fights with a motorcycle gang and falls in love for the first time. In the eponymous short novel, an unnamed Vietnamese army veteran writes his memoir, relating, in a detached voice, how he entered South Vietnam's military and, through the officers exchange program, befriended Paul in Panama before he shipped off to Vietnam. Returning home, the officer joined the National Liberation Front, taking up arms against his old American army pals. Concerned with the "moral ambiguity" of soldiers, the collection delves into the muddled experiences and allegiances of life during wartime. --Publishers Weekly

"Life, Paul has learned, proceeds by indirection." Paul is one of two protagonists in this spare, elliptical collection. Paul's moral education is presented in a series of often disjointed events from his youth, sketchily remembered in middle age. They touch on is reactions to life in the segregated South of the 1950s and his sometimes chaotic adolescence in southern California, which culminates in his desire to become very big and very tough. The second protagonist is an elderly man who served in the South Vietnamese Army, was trained by the U.S. Army, and ultimately switched sides and fought for the North. His tale is more linear than Paul's, it focuses almost entirely on his time in a remote Panamanian village with a handful of U.S. Special Forces sergeants. The men seem to have no duties, until they begin to be sent to Vietnam; in time, the narrator returns as well. Gold, whose Sergeant Dickinson (1999) focused on the savage reality of combat, eschews it almost entirely in this book. Here, he's proceeding by indirection. --Booklist

About this edition

• Publisher: Black Heron Press
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1936364026
• ISBN 13: 9781936364022
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 270