ABOUT THE BOOK

The fall of Saigon in 1975 marked the end of the Vietnam War, and, more than 50 years later, memories are already fading. Beginning in the mid-1950s with the Republic of South Vietnam in a civil war with North Vietnam over communism, the United States’ military commitment rose to half a million soldiers, airmen, and sailors in the 1960s, among them Jerome Loving, a 24-year-old college graduate. Over the next two decades, the conflict took the lives of nearly three million Vietnamese and sixty thousand Americans. Loving returned home from Vietnam in the final days of 1966 to watch the war as he pursued graduate degrees and pondered the cataclysm he had witnessed.

In After the Good War: A Vietnam Memoir, Loving describes his nearly nine months in the combat zone between the treacherous streets of Saigon and the harbor and air base at Cam Ranh Bay as part of the first major wave of American troops sent into the conflict. Primarily based on letters he wrote while “in-country” to his wife and a diary kept during his service in Vietnam, Loving’s memoir is not a war story per se but a lament. Its looming symbol is the Vietnam Veterans Memorial at the National Mall and Memorial Parks in Washington, DC, which, unlike previous war memorials or statues, is a wall of words with the names of the deceased American combatants.

After the Good War offers a deeply personal, nuanced meditation on the war and its aftereffects, both on American society and in the minds and hearts of the Americans who fought there.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jerome Loving, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English at Texas A&M, is the author of a number of biographies and critical studies in American literature, including Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself (1999), The Last Titan: A Life of Theodore Dreiser (2005), and Mark Twain: The Adventures of Samuel L. Clemens (2010), all published by the University of California Press, and Jack and Norman: A State-Raised Convict and the Legacy of Norman Mailer’s ‘The Executioner’s Song’ (2017 by Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s). 

He has been a Fulbright scholar in the former Soviet Union and in France, where he also taught as a visiting professor at the Sorbonne. His fellowships include a Guggenheim and a “We the People” grant from the National Endowment of the Humanities. He lives in Bryan/College Station and Houston, TX