The Moral Life of Soldiers

"The Moral Life of Soldiers: the American Education of a People's Army Officer" is a novel-as-memoir related by an elderly officer from the People's Army of Viet Nam, recalling his experience in the American army's Special Forces before the Vietnam War. The story is an investigation into a soldier's decision to take up arms against his former comrades. On another level, it is about the relations between men, and between men and women. And it is about the costs of love that one must sometimes pay. The novella, "Paul's Father," is set in Georgia just before school integration in the South. It focuses on a white family relocated to Georgia from the North, and the moral compromises they must make to live among their white neighbors, and the compromises they resist making.