Description
During my return home on furlough from the Vietnam War, I was supposed to have had time to reconnect with my mother for about a month. Instead, I came home to her funeral. Fresh from the war.
And here we have the story in a nutshell — the twilight of sanity, forces beyond our control, small people caught up in a dehumanizing process, nothing special about me. Trapped between life and death, truth and lies, light and dark is the disconnect— being neither here nor there, feeling but not feeling, a vivid intensity in the inner world that drains substance from the outer world reality.
These themes play out in the different phases of the story — leaving Vietnam, landing in my hometown where I confront a changed domestic reality, and attempting to reconnect with family and friends as the surprising nature of my reception challenges my understanding of both my part in a far-away war and of the very essence of my own country, coping with the emotional fall-out of having been in a situation that smashes one’s ideals and threatens one’s sense of self.
What was the point of protecting America from afar, the idea of America, if I could not save my own specific America that was flesh and blood?
This is a book you pick up if you want to understand and be there for the soldier coming home for a short time before being sent back out to war, any war, or if you want to understand the veteran who is recognizable physically but is not the same person who set out.
Something about A Destiny of Memories lingers between sittings and remains long after you have read the last sentence. Something about the indomitability of the human spirit.
