Born in 1978. That means the uncles and the friends' dads and the teachers and the bosses were all Vietnam. Not as history. As the men in the room.
Some of them talked. They would tell a young kid things they would not tell other adults — the crazy adventures, the noise, the weather, the things that happened that had no name yet. Others never spoke at all and you learned to read that silence as its own information. One teacher in high school had what everybody now calls PTSD. Nobody called it that then. He just snapped one day in class and the room understood immediately that he had been carrying something for a long time that had finally gotten too heavy.
These were not strangers. These were role models, coaches, neighbors. The men New York City was made of in the 1980s. The war had been over for barely a decade and its residue was everywhere — in the heroin, in the alcohol, in the way certain men held themselves like they were waiting for something to go wrong. A rough city and the vets were often the roughest part of it, not by nature but by what had been done to them and then left untreated.
A good friend was killed in Fallujah. Jen Harris. Helicopter pilot. Iraq, not Vietnam, but the same tradition — young, capable, gone. That sits differently than history. It sits in the specific.
Where It Came From
Hell's Glory is pulp. It does not pretend otherwise and it does not apologize for it.
The influences were Nam comics — the ones that understood Vietnam as atmosphere and poetry before they understood it as politics. Platoon. Apocalypse Now. Tour of Duty. The music, which is its own argument about what that era felt like from the inside. And The Things They Carried, which showed what the literary version of this material could do when someone was willing to take the weight seriously without sentimentality.
The book sits somewhere between those poles. Pulp pacing, gritty and fast, short chapters, the kind of writing that moves because the situation demands movement. But the atmosphere underneath it is heavy because the source material is heavy. You cannot hear dozens of veterans tell their stories over a lifetime and write something light about it.
The honest position going in: pacifist. Anti-war, not anti-soldier. Would fight if drafted — probably fine, not looking for it. The Vietnamese did not deserve what happened to them and that is not a complicated position. What is complicated is that the men sent to do it did not deserve what happened to them either. War stories have always held that tension. The best ones do not resolve it. They just stay inside it long enough to tell the truth.
