An unheard of storyteller with an analytical eye, Merrel Clubb has amassed the letters he despatched his mom and dad from the Pacific Theater of worldwide conflict II and his next reflections on that battle and on his lifestyles right into a type of then-and-now memoir. The letters are a treasure trove of humor, nervousness, and desire, revealing a tender guy thrust right into a warfare that he doesn't comprehend. via this unheard of portal at the prior, we research of the tragic absurdity of warfare, of a soldier knowledgeable for naval struggle yet despatched into land conflict with guns he'd by no means prior to fired; of command publish latrines at which even commanding officials have been sitting geese; of the ghoulish trophies and mementos that infantrymen accumulated from the battlefields.

The letters describe a bright forged of characters, from Clubb's formative years good friend who instilled a love of poetry in his comrades to the hillbilly singer and the prostitute with whom the younger Clubb had diverse amorous adventures. however the such a lot compelling determine during this narrative is, after all, Clubb himself, an highbrow who carried Jane Austen and Joseph Conrad with his tommy gun; who used books as a fortification for his foxhole, learning upon waking one morning that "Ouspensky stopped a bullet"; and who, in a darkly funny second, wrote domestic that "Plato is beautiful consoling, simply because i will be able to continuously imagine that someplace there's a excellent hell of a military of which this can be yet an imitation or representation."

Returning to those letters years later activates Clubb to appear back on the moment global warfare and on the atomic bomb that ended it. In an research as priceless to knowing our personal historic second because it is to reconsidering the earlier, Clubb counters the normal knowledge shared by way of veterans and civilians alike, really in regards to the suggestion of a "just war."

For Clubb, as for thus many veterans, the battle doesn't finish with the victory over Japan. regardless of the intervening years, Clubb reveals that the haunting episodes skilled over part a century in the past echo nonetheless. Even within the solitude of the wooded area, within the searching events he meets, within the animals he himself kills, he hears back the sound of conflict, sees back the faces of the sufferers of war.

Part letters, half memoir, and half scholarly research, this quantity levels over an enormous, colourful, and weighted territory. From the battles and respites within the Pacific Islands, to the evening golf equipment and get in touch with women of mainland San Francisco and San Diego; from the relative quiet of his aptly named native land, Stillwater, to the equally quiet Montana backcountry, Clubb's narrative explores the mental terrain of a lifestyles disturbed, and ceaselessly replaced, through war.