Bøger udgivet af LSU Press

Fighting in the Great Crusade combines the terse clarity of George E. Schwend's World War II combat journals with Gregory Daddis's expert commentary on the greater context of that conflict. The result is the rare military work that counterpoints historical and strategic analysis against a foxhole-level view of the war in Europe as U.S. soldiers experienced it. Schwend's story, which typifies that of young American citizen soldiers on whom the Allied cause depended, follows a draftee through the rigors of basic training and Officer Candidate School and into the grim theater of the European campaigns in 1944 and 1945. The accretion of detail forms a grittily realistic day-to-day account of military life, while Daddis's expansive historical backdrop invests with poignance even such routines as Schwend's faithful attendance at movie screenings as the soldier - and readers - anticipate the fateful Normandy invasion. Schwend observes that despite the rigors of his training nothing could have prepared him or his comrades for the savagery of the actions in which they fought: the Normandy Campaign, the harrowing Huertgen Forest, the Roer and Rhine River crossings, and the final battles in

Imagine the elation of having your dead son brought back to life. That is what Michael Sumner's parents experience when, one year after he's reported killed in action in Vietnam, they are told their son is alive and has escaped from a cadre of Viet Cong. But reunited with his family in their new Florida home, Michael has become a stranger to them, and soon living with him becomes more difficult than having him dead. Attempting to break into his suffering and get him back, fearful he may turn to violence, his parents suspect the worst when a young woman who has befriended Michael abruptly disappears.