This is the story of Albert French's encounter with war and with deaths beyond his understanding; of his return to a country torn by racial unrest in the wake of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr; and of his painstaking efforts to defeat his inner demons and make a place for himself as a black man in white America. With a starkness tempered by humour, French brings to life the horrors of Vietnam, of the ghostly images that haunted his dreams but this is also a revealing exploration of the black soldier's experience, the plight of the Vietnam veteran and the redemptive power of writing.
Few books have expressed so vividly the personal experience of war and its aftermath, or rendered so honestly the journey necessary to retrieve the human being from the ghost.