Review in ARMY Magazine

There is a nice review of Bringing It All Back Home in the April edition of ARMY, the magazine of the Association of the United States Army.

Assistant Managing Editor Jeremy Dow writes:

Bringing It All Back Home is more than just a collection of biographical sketches of veterans. Napoli writes about positive traits and experiences of Vietnam War veterans that need to be recognized. In doing so, however, he does more than just tell the reader about veterans of a conflict that ended several decades ago; he reminds us that their sacrifices deserve as much attention and appreciation as those of today’s veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Read the full review after the jump.

 

Review from H-War

H-Net is a set of academic list servs. A reviewer for one of them, H-War, has published a very nice review of Brining It All Back Home.

The reviewer, Joshua Akers, writes:

“Napoli clearly demonstrates how historians should employ the subjective nature of oral histories to break down stereotypes and interpretations that pigeonhole veterans into roles such as victim.

Alternate Ending

Bringing It All Back Home, my book about Vietnam veterans, went through many editors and was revised numerous times on its way to publication.

I have pasted below a few concluding paragraphs that I personally found meaningful, but were cut in the editorial process.

I’m prompted to post this because of a comment I received on my YouTube page, which has some clips from the interviews I did for the book.

A person clearly had watched my interview with Tony Wallace, in which he tells the story of being wounded on April 15, 1970. The individual wrote, “I met this gentleman while riding on the Q113 bus… I have the so much respect for Vietnam vets. We should all support them.”

***

Over the years that have elapsed since I began this project, Tony Wallace and I have grown close. We have made many trips together on Veterans Day. In 2008 we attended the ceremony at the Wall in DC. We spent the afternoon there, in the cold drizzle of a Washington November day, listening to various speakers tell us of their experiences, and about the meaning of the wall. The green of the Capital Mall lawn was covered with folding chairs and umbrellas, as the afternoon wound down. As we were leaving, Tony sought out a homeless veteran he had met at the Wall earlier in the year, and gave the man a new coat and a new pair of shoes that he had brought from New York just for that purpose. We chatted with him for a while and took photos as the night gathered.

After we got back to the hotel room we shared and prepared for sleep, from the other side of the room, Tony said, “I think it is time for you to see this.”

Already in his pajamas, he knelt down and peeled back the pajama top revealing the deep and ugly scars from the blast that had killed Wolf, Pepe and DiSantis. The blast had changed his life forever. There, on his knees, he exposed his back to me for several moments. It is very hard to describe what I saw. The skin had been torn; it was discolored. There were scars that had not healed properly and you could see the effects of several skin grafts that had been done to try to close the wound. Where the skin was not torn, it was peppered with scars where shrapnel had entered his body. Tony rose and re-buttoned his top.

“Now you know,” was all he said.

I don’t recall that I responded at all.

We went to sleep.

The next morning over breakfast, I said to him that what he had done was enormously powerful for me. He had shown me what only two other people had ever seen; his wife and his doctor. I said that I thought I understood the metaphorical and symbolic significance of showing me his wound on a weekend filled with both memory and celebration. I told him that seeing a black man on his knees in front of me was a humbling experience and a frightening one. The racial symbolism of that moment, so deeply fraught in American history, with its legacy of violence, exploitation, humiliation and fear left me deeply moved. As a result of his bravery, his willingness to share and be vulnerable had seemed to shift me into a subset of people, privileged enough to see first hand one version of how badly damaged a Vietnam veteran could be.

Tony