BRING THE WAR HOME! slices through to expose gritty parts of the forgotten reality

As the real Vietnam War and the antiwar movement get buried under layers of fantasy and myth, BRING THE WAR HOME! slices through to expose gritty parts of the forgotten reality. This novel brings home to readers in the twenty-first century aspects of the war and the antiwar movement that they will not encounter in any other book.-H. Bruce Franklin, Professor of English, Rutgers and author of Vietnam and Other American Fantasies

No other book that I know of offers such a genuine picture of this troubled time

Too many students today believe that anti-Vietnam War protesters spat on returning GIs, but Barry Willdorf’s gripping novel about antiwar organizing at a Marine base explodes such myths. Based on the author’s own experience, BRING THE WAR HOME! reveals how more than a few soldiers and protesters, black and white, joined together to resist both the war and racism, sharing the idealism, but also the inconstancy and indecision, of their youth. Students who know the Ô60s only from Forrest Gump and other oversimplified caricatures will here be introduced to the real human beings who were part of the antiwar movement: hedonistic and self-sacrificing, privileged and penniless, cooperative yet disputatious, visionary and practical, victims and victimizers. No other book that I know of offers such a genuine picture of this troubled time. And few are as readable and entertaining. I can recommend it without hesitation for any course covering U.S. history in the second half of the twentieth century.
-Henry Reichman, Chair, Department of History, California State University, Hayward

This first novel is a winner

A far-out, action packed novel, guaranteed to introduce you to a time when America was populated with the likes of the Black Panthers, the Yippies and the Weathermen, when radicals quoted Chairman Mao Tse-tung and the Beatles provided the sound-track for the real-life movie of a generation.
The two main characters find themselves in Southern California in the thick of the turbulent GI Movement. Their cross-country adventures take readers through a highly politicized landscape that is jam-packed with all the heated issues connected with race and class. Of course, there’s also sex, drugs and rock n’ roll and there is a suspenseful trial that keeps you turning pages, wanting to know the verdict. Bring the War Home! is a compelling love story, too. No matter what side you were on in the 1960′s, there’s something here for you. This first novel is a winner.

-Jonah Raskin, Chair, Communications Studies Department, Sonoma State University
and author of For the Hell of It: The Life and Times of Abbie Hoffman.

Literate and Accessible

Literate and accessible.É So many themes of the era brought together in a natural way around an unsung centerpiece, the GI MovementÉClearly an expose of racism in society and the Marines, but going deep enough to get into the hard stuff around racial issues that didn’t sit pretty.
-Steve Morse, Vietnam GI Activist

Willdorf gets it down

Most Americans know that there was a war in Vietnam, but very few know that thousands of GIs actively opposed the war. In his novel, Bring the War Home!, Barry Willdorf tells the story of what the Marine anti-war movement looked like at Camp Pendleton. Willdorf knows the story well because he lived it; and because he lived it, he tells it well – with both sympathy and honesty. A fine descriptive writer, Willdorf gets it down; the headquarters that became a virtual bunker after it was shot up by right-wing vigilantes, the conflicted personalities of the Marine resisters, the quirks of the radicals who chose this dangerous site to organize against the war. It’s all there.
-Peter Booth Wiley, Publisher, John Wiley and Sons, author of Yankees in the Land of the Gods.

A welcome addition to the literature of peace

This first novel by San Francisco trial attorney Barry Willdorf offers a compelling re-creation of the resistance to the Vietnam War from a unique point of view. Not only does Willdorf create a realistic sense of the paranoia and harassment that existed in Southern California towards the peace movement, he portrays many other factors of the times: the sexual politics of the day, both in the protagonist’s daily life and in the wider context of the nascent women’s movement; the inner machinations of the peace movement itself; the drug culture that took its toll on some activists; and most importantly, the racism that existed both in the anti-war movement and in the Marines.
One of the most moving scenes comes toward the end of the book, in the speech by Marine “Jumping Jack,” a combat veteran who had come to the conclusion that his own actions, and the actions of his superiors in encouraging him, constituted war crimes. Hospitalized in a psychiatric ward after a post-traumatic stress flashback, Jack had walked away from the Marines and made his way across the border to Canada. Arrested on his return to the United States, accused of treason and desertion, Jack’s speech during his trial is an indictment and a plea, and a call for peace from a man who had experienced first-hand the worst of the horrors of war.

Skillfully written, well-plotted, unique in its characters and its setting, this book is a welcome addition to the literature of peace that includes such classics as All Quiet on the Western Front.

-Margaret Speaker Yuan, Bay Area Independent Publishers Association

Bound to be a classic

Barry Willdorf describes his “Bring Home the War!” as a “novel about resistence to racism and the Vietnam War in the United States Marine Corps.” It is, however, much more than that. Being a skillfully written work, it represents a keen metahistorical insight into the complexities of the turmoil that rocked America nearly off its foundations during the Vietnam War era.
Eric Wolfe, the main character in “Bring Home the War!” is a newly graduated Eastern law-school student who, with his wife Emma,moves to Oceanside, California to defend U.S. Marines who are in legal trouble because of their anti-war activities. Through Eric and Emma’s experiences over a one-year stay at Oceanside,1970, Willdorf realistically introduces social, political and moral issues such as racial discrimination, women’s right, a growing drug culture, and law and order in a rapidly destabilizing society populated by an outspoken generation of baby boomers that some have called “the wounded generation.” (see A.D. Horne, editor, “The Wounded Generation”)

In plot, dialogue, characterization and setting that read much like Raymond Chandler’s hard-boiled detective novels of the 1920s (for a connection between these novels and Vietnam War literature, see John Hellman’s “American Myth and the Legacy of Vietnam”), Willdorf vividly describes a human landscape that is corrupt, violent, and rapidly deteriorating for America’s less-advantaged young people while the more privileged members of the nation’s youth-oriented society insulate themselves from a MacBethian brew of woes that seethe beyond their protected enclaves. Alienation is a key theme running through this bleak landscape.

After a long series of troubling and exhausting events that culminate in the military trial of a Marine corporal who speaks out against the military for condoning an atrocity he committed in Vietnam, Willdorf states at the end of his novel that the generation of young people who survived the tumultuous events of the Vietnam War era “would now be picking up the pieces for a long time to come.” (p. 268)

“Bring Home the War!” is bound to be a classic work on a conflict that spilled over from Indochina into the streets of this nation. As such, the novel reflects a period in U.S. history that has come to haunt Americans as no other time has done since the Civil War. Perusing Willddorf’s book is reminiscent of reading Robert Stone’s “war-at-home” novel “Dog Soldiers” (1974). Well written, fast paced and brutal, “Bring Home the War!” is at the top of a growing list of new books which give clear insight into America’s longest and most troubling foreign and internal conflict.

-Walter R. Jones, Assistant Head of Special Collections, University of Utah Library

If you want to know what it was really like, read this book

The sixties have largely been sanitized and trivialized in the popular consciousness into a decade of “sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll”. Seldom do people remember when that phrase comesup that there were two profound social movements in play — the civil rights movement, and, slightly later but overlapping, the movement against the Vietnam war.
This trivialization is no accident, I’m afraid. Even at the time, I recall newspaper reporters who found it inconceivable that as college students we could be sincerely concerned about something happening to anyone else but us. They really wanted to believe that the only thing that could really be motivating us was sex or drugs. Certainly the forces of power and authority found it eminently convenient to slander us with that accusation. And anti-war G.I.’s were hardly ever mentioned. But nothing about the sixties and early seventies is comprehensible without focusing on those two movements.

The book shows really well how there were so many different ways that people had of trying to make sense of the world at the time. Because most of the time, the range of acceptable political discourse is really quite narrow. Most ideas simply aren’t deemed worthy of discussion. One of the remarkable things about that period is that the world really did open up for so many of us, and all sorts of mutually incompatible ideas were up for grabs. This led to a lot of destructive factionalism and nonsensical infighting, but it also led to some real insights and permanent changes. (Just compare the status of women today with that in the 1950′s, when I was a kid, for only one example.) The wonder is that with all the centrifugal forces in motion at the time, those of us working against the war were able to get anything done at all. Yet we did — we really did “bring the war home,” and this nation is the better for it. This book shows one of the ways we did this — with all our messy and contradictory ideas and opinions, with all the crazy and not-so-crazy and sometimes heroic things we did.

The trial scene, by the way, is a knockout. I couldn’t get it out of my mind for days. It really brought back why so many of us were so determined to end that war.

-Carl D. Offner, Sudbury, MA

Willdorf’s tale brings back good times and nightmares

For boomers and War Babies who were young during the Vietnam War, Willdorf’s tale brings back good times and nightmares. I was carried back to the late 60′s, recalling all the bumps in the road, ready to look at it all in retrospect. By the time you get to know this young couple taking on the Military establishment in Camp Pendleton, you’re involved in their plights and disappointments, and cheering their goals.
The descriptions were vivid, and it was great reading.

-Dean Cail,Willits, CA

Highly recommended

This book is an extremely moving portrait of a little-discussed part of the movement against the Vietnam War: the anti-war organizing within the U.S. Marines. The book’s presentation of marines who have grown disillusioned with the war is compelling, and the stories of several of the marines — fictional, but clearly based in real stories and experiences — are the most valuable parts of the book. The trial scene toward the end of the book gives a better sense of what the Vietnam War meant than any “scholarly” historical examination I have seen.
Aside from these stories, Willdorf describes a very engaging, sometimes ridiculous, sometimes very smart, group of civilian organizers whose work to support the anti-war marines sheds light on a generation’s shifting experiences of race and gender. The book manages to take on a lot of difficult topics while remaining a readable, moving, and often very funny narrative.

-A reader, Boston, MA