The Sorrow of War: A Novel of North Vietnam

“The strongest, best-written novel by a new writer I have seen for a very long time is Charles Coleman’s “Sergeant Back Again.” Coleman, who served in the Army Medical Corps and later in the mental wards at Chambers Pavilion, Fort Sam Houston, the scene of his book, tells us in the Foreword: “I did not make this story: it came to me that way, ready-made, defined by historical circumstances, generated by the soldiers who have had to fight the most insidious and intimate battle: the one with yourself. . . . In writing this book I am mainly a chronicler who was left no choice but to try to speak for the inarticulate, the psychically scarred, and the wasted . . . . It is a synthesis of personal experiences, observations, interviews, and journals here woven together into a narrative.”