THE LONG RETURN

O’Meara recounts his perilous service in the Vietnam War—and his inhospitable reception when he returned home—in this memoir.

In 1968, the author was a sophomore in college and thereby protected from the draft, but his grades dipped low enough to render him fair game. In 1969, he was inducted into the U.S. Army. Despite training to become a mortar crew chief, a specialization that would have conferred considerable benefits, he was assigned to the 101st Airborne Infantry. A “shorn hippy college boy, reluctantly masquerading as a real soldier,” he was deployed to Vietnam’s Highlands just below the DMZ, an area swarming with enemy troops; his mission was to disrupt their supply chains. His introduction to the war was not gentle—by his second day in the field, he had experienced combat. Danger was everywhere: Snipers, booby traps, and land mines demanded “hyper vigilance,” a tense state of expectancy artfully described by O’Meara. Unmoved and even disgusted by the ideology behind the war, he did his best to stay alive and suffered the “soul crushingly slow” passage of time until his manumission from duty. When he finally made it home, only to be met with “scorn and derision” from a populous that had grown sour on the war, he felt an ache he had difficulty fully identifying or describing. He affectingly articulates the experience: “I wasn’t sure at what point I would feel like I was back home again, but I knew I wasn’t anywhere near it. I had a nagging sense of unrecoverable loss, which seemed odd at the time. After all, I was still a young man, alive, in one piece, and apparently, invulnerable.” The world has an inexhaustible supply of Vietnam War memoirs, and while O’Meara’s doesn’t break any new ground, it is notable for its impressive blend of candor and eloquence. His writing combines the unpretentious informality of personal anecdote with a rhetorical gracefulness that often flirts with the poetic. This is a profoundly moving work, intelligently rendered and heartbreaking.

A deeply thoughtful remembrance of a soldier’s experience in war.