Soldiers Once

My Brother and the Lost Dreams of America's Veterans

The story is about a sister who had a brother who went to Vietnam. He died an early, unexplained death in his 50's which left his estranged family to try to put the pieces of his life back together. This sounds almost ordinary, but the truth is that one of the great tragedies of Vietnam is all the silent death that occurred years and years after its aftermath. Service men came home and were not able to get the support they needed and have struggled in many ways. Suicide rates are notoriously under reported. Post-traumatic stress disorders were flat out denied until very recently. Many, many men who served our country through a perilous, horrific war came home and to this date are not aware that they are due the benefits they earned through the VA System. These injustices are well documented in this book and deserve recognition. We are already making some of the same mistakes with our new veterans coming home from Afghanistan and Iraq, as citizens of this country we owe it to them to try to grasp their experience and sacrifice. This book offers an excellent introduction into that world.

This is a great introduction to war experience. It cannot supplement the many amazing books that document their own personal and real accounts of this experience. However, it is a great introduction and potentially a book to give family members of service men and women or those people who love them to try to help them understand the on-going suffering they may be going through.

Book 11