Father, Soldier, Son
Memoir of a Platoon Leader In Vietnam
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4.7 • 7 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A former platoon leader reflects on his troubled father, the meaning of leadership, and living life on the front lines in “one of the finest soldier memoirs of the Vietnam War” (The Boston Globe)
Nathaniel Tripp grew up fatherless in a house full of women. When he arrived in Vietnam as a just-promoted second lieutenant in the summer of 1968, he had no memory of a man’s example to guide and sustain him. The father missing from Tripp’s life was a military man himself—a Navy soldier in World War II—but the terrors of war were too much for him. Disgraced and addled by mental illness, Tripp’s father could not bring himself to return to his wife and young son after the war.
In “some of the best prose this side of Tim O’Brien 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 father’s life—and how the lessons he learned under fire helped him in the raising of his own sons.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A case study in the development of a junior officer, Tripp's polished Vietnam memoir focuses on his six months as an infantry platoon leader in 1968. As Tripp, a TV producer, farmer and children's writer (Thunderstorm!), tells it, self-doubt and confusion never quite left him in Vietnam; instead, they fostered a sense of responsibility for the men under his command. In Vietnam, Tripp began for the first time in his life to trust his instincts and behavior-and however other units may have behaved, Tripp's battalion, the 1/28th Infantry, 1st Division, emerges from these pages as an outfit that knew how to fight and that fought well. In these respects, Tripp's account is similar to many war memoirs. It is individualized, however, as the title suggests: Tripp was strongly influenced by his ambivalent relationship with a father who suffered repeated psychotic episodes. His behavior in Vietnam was structured by a corresponding desire to prove himself and to find himself; and his disordered postwar life was influenced not only by his wartime experiences but also by a fear that his own sons might develop the cystic fibrosis hereditary in Tripp's family. Most Vietnam literature presents American participants as blank slates on whom war wrote its story unimpaired. Tripp's chronicle is a powerful reminder that men and women carry a life's worth of baggage when they go to war, as well as when they return.
