A Quiet Cadence
A Novel
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Winner of 2020 W.Y. Boyd Literary Award for Excellence in Military Fiction Military Writers Society of America Award Winner: Gold Medal in Historical Fiction Winner of the 2021 William E. Colby Award Sometimes it takes years for a combat vet to understand what war did to him when he was nineteen. With the perception and reflection of a man on the cusp of retirement from a career teaching high school kids, Marty McClure recalls the relentless intensity of prolonged combat as a teenaged Marine machine gunner facing booby traps and battles in a war with few boundaries. Family and friends know Marty as a kind, peaceful man. They aren‘t aware that when he was young, he plumbed the depths of terror, hatred, and despair with no assurance he‘d ever surface again. Now he needs to reveal what happened in Vietnam and how, with the help of Patti, his wife, Corrie Corrigan, a disabled vet, and Doc Matheson, a corpsman turned trauma surgeon, he works to become a good husband, father, and teacher while he fights to bury the war. Only if he accepts help from his wife and his friends will he find real peace.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Treanor's immersive if sometimes leaden debut contains a Vietnam War veteran's reflections on combat and coming home. Forty years after his time in the Marines, Marty McClure decides to set down his story for his children. He begins by flashing back to his first days in-country. Before long, his fellow soldiers becomes casualties, triggering VC booby trap after booby trap, which either kill them instantly or leave them horribly maimed. The repetitious nature of these sections packs a heavy wallop, though Treanor gives his readers little time to engage emotionally with the characters before their deaths. After McClure is wounded by a gunshot to the back and sent home, he struggles to adjust stateside. When McClure visits a friend at the University of Virginia, another student calls him a "baby killer," and McClure feels a rush of anger, fueled by flashbacks of his friends' deaths on the battlefield. He describes visits from "ghosts," alluding to PTSD, and remarks on how his children might be surprised to learn of his years spent dreaming of violent revenge against the enemy soldiers. While the awkward prose fails to bring Treanor's chronicle in league with the best Vietnam War fiction, his narrator holds the reader's attention with consistent earnestness. This inspired treatment of a challenging chapter in U.S. history is worth a look.
