Father, Soldier, Son: Memoir of a Platoon Leader in Vietnam
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The first duty of an infantry officer is the care of his men, but Nathaniel Tripp grew up fatherless in a house run by women. He arrived in Vietnam as a just-promoted second lieutenant in the summer of 1968 with no memory of a man's example to guide and sustain him. The father missing from Tripp's life had gone off to war as well; in the Navy in World War II, the terrors were too much for him: he disgraced himself, and after the war ended he could not bring himself to return to his wife and young son.
Tripp's men were often in combat in the jungles along Highway 13 during the bloodiest year of the war, but it was responsibility, not the enemy, that Tripp feared most. How Tripp learned to face both, to become the father he had barely known, to support and sustain the men in his care, are the subjects of this engrossing memoir of one man's year in America's longest, saddest war. |
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