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A World of Hurt
A novel about the war in Vietnam—not war as psychedelic light show, state of mind, or even hell on Earth, but the war as it was—through the eyes of two Green Berets who chose to fight there for very different reasons.
Here is the traumatic struggle in Vietnam stripped of myth and polemics and made comprehensibly human. The fiery rhetoric and fragmented images from the evening news fall away as Bo Hathaway takes the reader from basic training through jungles swarming with an invisible enemy to the sweet, sultry bordellos of Nha Trang.
For Jeff Madsen and David Sloane, two young Americans from disparate backgrounds, being drafted in the mid-Sixties offers an escape from their private boredom—and, as it turns out, a chance to confront their deepest and most destructive inner drives. But most of all, Vietnam promises the kind of action they'll never taste in a numbing civilian society. While others of their generation are making music, getting high, and protesting the war, Madsen and Sloane seek their own form of self-awareness and stimulation by plunging into the violence of combat.
Hathaway's treatment of his subject is neither glamorous nor muckraking—he conveys the tenor of wartime experience authentically, without injecting it with artificial drama. The Special Forces training sequences are distinguished by his perfect ear for the bizarre and often hilarious military argot, and events such as the soldiers' first parachute jump are rendered with an immediacy that will leave the reader breathless. What happens to Madsen and Sloane in Vietnam—their trial by fire and its unexpected aftermath—is a story of immense authority and power.
Here is the traumatic struggle in Vietnam stripped of myth and polemics and made comprehensibly human. The fiery rhetoric and fragmented images from the evening news fall away as Bo Hathaway takes the reader from basic training through jungles swarming with an invisible enemy to the sweet, sultry bordellos of Nha Trang.
For Jeff Madsen and David Sloane, two young Americans from disparate backgrounds, being drafted in the mid-Sixties offers an escape from their private boredom—and, as it turns out, a chance to confront their deepest and most destructive inner drives. But most of all, Vietnam promises the kind of action they'll never taste in a numbing civilian society. While others of their generation are making music, getting high, and protesting the war, Madsen and Sloane seek their own form of self-awareness and stimulation by plunging into the violence of combat.
Hathaway's treatment of his subject is neither glamorous nor muckraking—he conveys the tenor of wartime experience authentically, without injecting it with artificial drama. The Special Forces training sequences are distinguished by his perfect ear for the bizarre and often hilarious military argot, and events such as the soldiers' first parachute jump are rendered with an immediacy that will leave the reader breathless. What happens to Madsen and Sloane in Vietnam—their trial by fire and its unexpected aftermath—is a story of immense authority and power.
318 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1981
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