Coming Home

He survived Vietnam. Coming home nearly finished him.

Mike Delaney leaves David City, Nebraska, the way young men always have - with more certainty than the world owes him and less preparation than he knows. He returns from Vietnam carrying wounds no one can see, stepping into a country that has already begun trying to forget the war and the men who fought it.

The medals do not help. The silence at the dinner table does not help. The endless forms and waiting rooms of the VA do not help. Back home, Mike discovers that surviving the battlefield was only the beginning. The real struggle lies in learning how to live again.

Edward C. Distel writes fiction shaped by memory, exile, war, and the quiet lives history often forgets. Raised in a multilingual household and deeply influenced by the immigrant experience, his work explores loyalty, identity, survival, and the stories people carry in silence.

Drawn to both novels and short fiction, Distel believes the most powerful stories are often the most intimate. His writing blends literary realism with psychological depth, creating characters marked as much by what they cannot say as by what they do.

He prefers to let his characters speak for themselves.

These are his first published works, though far from his only stories.