Father, Soldier, Son

A former platoon leader reflects on his troubled father, the meaning of leadership, and living life on the front lines in “one of the finest soldier memoirs of the Vietnam War” ( The Boston Globe ) Nathaniel Tripp grew up fatherless in a house full of women. When he arrived in Vietnam as a just-promoted second lieutenant in the summer of 1968, he had no memory of a man’s example to guide and sustain him. The father missing from Tripp’s life was a military man himself—a Navy soldier in