The Moral Life of Soldiers

The Moral Life of Soldiers is composed of a novel and five stories, one of which is novella length. The title story, the novel, is told by an elderly officer retired from the People's Army of Viet Nam (North Vietnam), recalling his experience in the American army's Special Forces in Central America before he joined the PAVN. On one level, the story is about what causes a soldier to take up arms against his comrades. But the story is also about the relations between men, and between men and women. And it is about the price one must sometimes pay for love. The novella, "Paul's Father," is set in 1950's Georgia, in the period just before school integration in the south. It focuses on a white family relocated to Georgia from the north, and the moral compromises they must make to live peacefully among their white neighbors, and the compromises they resist making. All of the five stories and the novel have as their protagonist or as a major character the same boy-become-man.

Jerome Gold of Seattle, WA Jerome Gold is the author of thirteen books, including the fiction collection, The Moral Life of Soldiers, and Paranoia & Heartbreak, a memoir of the years he spent as a rehabilitation counselor in a prison for children. He lives in Seattle, Washington.