Almost A Proverb

This novel contains strong language and depicts graphic scenes of violence and sexuality.

From the first words of this book the reader is yanked out of their lethargic postmodern complacency and forced to confront the hard-core reality of the world (s)he inhabits. As a gripping and honest chronicle of war and warriors, Almost a Proverb takes its place in the long Western tradition of epic war narrative that began with Homer's Iliad. It is, however, a very different sort of war story. Of war, much has already been written; indeed, it seems to be the central myth of our culture. Perhaps it is the case, as Chris Hedges asserts, that "war is a force that gives us meaning" (one wonders-and perhaps not idly-how different our culture might now be if a matriarchal peace ethos was instead the core value of our society). There has been more written about the American War in Vietnam than any other war to date-histories, soldier's memoirs, fiction, poetry, dissections of strategy and politics, propagandist tracts, biographies, analyses of battles and catalogues of equipment-a vast sea of writings that span a continuum from the most erudite scholarship to the most lurid war porn imaginable. Sometimes-more often than we would like to think-the former becomes indistinguishable from the latter, and we forget that when one speaks of war, (s)he speaks of real human beings suffering in the most extreme and horrific circumstances. The war narrative sings of blood, death, fire, steel, trauma, degradation, privation, grief, berserk rage, killing of innocents, shattered lives. It speaks as well of the profound, enduring love that grows between comrades, the finding of identity and self-and its preservation-under the most adverse conditions. Why yet another Vietnam book, almost thirty years after war's end? Exactly because we as a species remain collectively poised on the brink of our own violent destruction, and because we still (apparently) have not learned the lessons of Vietnam, e