Posted: 11:24 pm PT
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Former Foreign Service officer Peter Van Buren wrote We Meant Well and Ghosts of Tom Joad. He is back with a third novel Hooper’s War. The author writes that while the story in Hooper’s War is set in WWII Japan, the point of the bigger story here is aimed dead-center at the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“The men and women in Hooper confront the complex ethical decisions of war, torture, drone-like killings, and the aftermath of moral injury and PTSD. This is an antiwar novel for people who enjoy a good war story — think Catch-22. Sometimes funny, sometimes deadly serious.”
Ann Wright, U.S. Army Reserve Colonel and former U.S. diplomat has this to day say about the book:
“Hooper’s War is a classic war story of blood and guts spilled in Japan during WWII but with contemporary meanings. Told by both a young American lieutenant and a young Japanese soldier, Van Buren writes of the inevitable questioning of what wars do to those who fight. ‘This shit doesn’t end when the war does, it only ends when we do.’ ‘Garner is likely to just be insane for the rest of his life, mind torn apart and all that. His body’s in terrific shape, not a scratch. But the question isn’t so much why Private Garner is screaming. It’s why we aren’t, Lieutenant.’
‘Besides, Garner went insane because of what he saw in Kyoto. Curing him means I’d have to convince him seeing the burned children he’s shouting about was not a reason to be insane.’ These are commentaries echoed seventy-five years later by our young soldiers with PTSD from the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.”
Below is an excerpt courtesy of Amazon Preview:
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