Bring the War Home!

By Barry S. Willdorf

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• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 097130260X
• ISBN13: 9780971302600
• Release Date: October 2001
• Publisher: A Gauche Pr
• Length: 275 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.8" x 5.5"

Customer Reviews

Barry Willdorf's "Bring Home the War!"

Barry Willdorf describes his "Bring Home the War!" as a "novel about resistence to racism and the Vietnam War in the United States Marine Corps." It is, however, much more than that. Being a skillfully written work, it represents a keen metahistorical insight into the complexities of the turmoil that rocked America nearly off its foundations during the Vietnam War era.Eric Wolfe, the main character in "Bring Home the War!" is a newly graduated Eastern law-school student who, with his wife Emma,moves to Oceanside, California to defend U.S. Marines whoare in legal trouble because of their anti-war activities. Through Eric and Emma's experiences over a one-year stay at Oceanside,1970, Willdorf realistically introduces social, political and moral issues such as racial discrimination, women's right, a growing drug culture, and law and order in a rapidly destabilizing society populated by an outspoken generation of baby boomers that some have called "the wounded generation." (see A.D. Horne, editor, "The Wounded Generation")In plot, dialogue, characterization and setting that read much like Raymond Chandler's hard-boiled detective novels of the 1920s (for a connection between these novels and Vietnam War literature, see John Hellman's "American Myth and the Legacy of Vietnam"), Willdorf vividly describes a human landscape that is corrupt, violent, and rapidly deteriorating for America's less-advantaged young people while the more privileged members of the nation's youth-oriented society insulate themselves from a MacBethian brew of woes that seethe beyond their protected enclaves. Alienation is a key theme running through this bleak landscape.After a long series of troubling and exhausting events that culminate in the military trial of a Marine corporal who speaks out against the military for condoning an atrocity he committed in Vietnam, Willdorf states at the end of his novel that the generation of young people who survived the tumultuous events of the Vietnam War era "would now be picking up the pieces for a long time to come." (p. 268)"Bring Home the War!" is bound to be a classic work on a conflict that spilled over from Indochina into the streets of this nation. As such, the novel reflects a period in U.S. history that has come to haunt Americans as no other time has done since the Civil War. Perusing Willddorf's book is reminiscent of reading Robert Stone's "war-at-home" novel "Dog Soldiers" (1974). Well written, fast paced and brutal, "Bring Home the War!" is at the top of a growing list of new books which give clear insight into America's longest and most troubling foreign and internal conflict.

Highly Recommended

This book is an extremely moving portrait of a little-discussed part of the movement against the Vietnam War: the anti-war organizing within the U.S. Marines. The book's presentation of marines who have grown disillusioned with the war is compelling, and the stories of several of the marines -- fictional, but clearly based in real stories and experiences -- are the most valuable parts of the book. The trial scene toward the end of the book gives a better sense of what the Vietnam War meant than any "scholarly" historical examination I have seen.Aside from these stories, Willdorf describes a very engaging, sometimes ridiculous, sometimes very smart, group of civilian organizers whose work to support the anti-war marines sheds light on a generation's shifting experiences of race and gender. The book manages to take on a lot of difficult topics while remaining a readable, moving, and often very funny narrative.

If you want to know what it was really like, read this book.

The sixties have largely been sanitized and trivialized in thepopular consciousness into a decade of "sex, drugs, androck-n-roll". Seldom do people remember when that phrase comesup that there were two profound social movements in play -- thecivil rights movement, and, slightly later but overlapping, themovement against the Vietnam war.This trivialization is no accident, I'm afraid. Even at thetime, I recall newspaper reporters who found it inconceivablethat as college students we could be sincerely concerned aboutsomething happening to anyone else but us. They really wanted tobelieve that the only thing that could really be motivating uswas sex or drugs. Certainly the forces of power and authorityfound it eminently convenient to slander us with that accusation.And anti-war G.I.'s were hardly ever mentioned. But nothingabout the sixties and early seventies is comprehensible withoutfocusing on those two movements.The book shows really well how there were so many different waysthat people had of trying to make sense of the world at the time.Because most of the time, the range of acceptable politicaldiscourse is really quite narrow. Most ideas simply aren'tdeemed worthy of discussion. One of the remarkable things aboutthat period is that the world really did open up for so many ofus, and all sorts of mutually incompatible ideas were up forgrabs. This led to a lot of destructive factionalism andnonsensical infighting, but it also led to some real insights andpermanent changes. (Just compare the status of women today withthat in the 1950's, when I was a kid, for only one example.) Thewonder is that with all the centrifugal forces inmotion at the time, those of us working against the war were able to get anything done at all. Yet we did -- we really did "bringthe war home," and this nation is the better for it. This bookshows one of the ways we did this -- with all our messy andcontradictory ideas and opinions, with all the crazy andnot-so-crazy and sometimes heroic things we did.The trial scene, by the way, is a knockout. I couldn't get itout of my mind for days. It really brought back why so many ofus were so determined to end that war.

Bring The War Home!

For boomers and War Babies who were young during the Vietnam War, Willdorf's tale brings back good times and nightmares. I was carried back to the late 60's, recalling all the bumps in the road, ready to look at it all in retrospect. By the time you get to know this young couple taking on the Military establishment in Camp Pendleton, you're involved in their plights and disappointments, and cheering their goals.The descriptions were vivid, and it was great reading.

All Quiet on the Home Front

This first novel by San Francisco trial attorney Barry Willdorf offers a compelling re-creation of the resistance to the Vietnam War from a unique point of view. Not only does Willdorf create a realistic sense of the paranoia and harassment that existed in Southern California towards the peace movement, he portrays many other factors of the times: the sexual politics of the day, both in the protagonist's daily life and in the wider context of the nascent women's movement; the inner machinations of the peace movement itself; the drug culture that took its toll on some activists; and most importantly, the racism that existed both in the anti-war movement and in the Marines.One of the most moving scenes comes toward the end of the book, in the speech by Marine "Jumping Jack," a combat veteran who had come to the conclusion that his own actions, and the actions of his superiors in encouraging him, constituted war crimes. Hospitalized in a psychiatric ward after a post-traumatic stress flashback, Jack had walked away from the Marines and made his way across the border to Canada. Arrested on his return to the United States, accused of treason and desertion, Jack's speech during his trial is an indictment and a plea, and a call for peace from a man who had experienced first-hand the worst of the horrors of war.Skillfully written, well-plotted, unique in its characters and its setting, this book is a welcome addition to the literature of peace that includes such classics as All Quiet on the Western Front.