Carry me home
By: John M. Del Vecchio.
Publisher: Bantam Books
Published: 1995
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 719
Subjects: Vietnamese Conflict, 1961-1975 -- Veterans -- Fiction; Men -- Pennsylvania -- Fiction; Pennsylvania -- Fiction
Description: Rare is the novel that speaks for an entire generation, that captures a pivotal moment in our lives, that sums up an era. Carry Me Home marks just such an accomplishment, an extraordinary achievement in the literature of our time. In his two previous novels, The 13th Valley and For the Sake of All Living Things, John M. Del Vecchio brilliantly established himself as the premier voice of the Viet Nam experience.

Now, in a powerful and poignant epic that places Del Vecchio in the top rank of American novelists, he transports the soldiers of that distant war to their final battlefield - the home front.

High Meadow Farm, in the fertile hill country of central Pennsylvania, would be their salvation. In Viet Nam they had fought side by side, brothers in arms. Now in the face of personal tragedy and bureaucratic deception, they would create a more enduring allegiance, an alliance of the spirit and the soil. This is the remarkable story of their struggle to find each other and themselves, a saga spanning fifteen years - fifteen years lost in a wilderness called America.

In 1969 Bobby Wapinski, Tony Piseno, and Ty Blackwell came home to a world that had changed forever - a land of promises unkept, hopes betrayed, dreams deferred and finally destroyed. Confronted by a nation embittered by its "dirty little war," a country that refuses to welcome them back, they discover that nothing is more painful than making peace and remaking lives torn apart. Each in his own way is a casualty of war.

Ty, who fought for a society that now shuts him out because of the color of his skin, descends into drug addiction and a life on the streets. Tony, haunted by memories of war and subject to fits of rage and despair, finds dubious refuge in a VA hospital. Bobby, unable to reconnect to his roots in the Pennsylvania farm country, runs to California in a reckless pursuit of money, success, and free love.

But it is Bobby who will come home first as he embarks on an experiment that will alter the course not only of his own life but that of Ty, Tony, and many others like them. Now his fellow vets are coming home to join him at the community he has built at High Meadow Farm. There they will find common ground, a new code of honor, and the courage and commitment to come to terms with the past and the future.