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Prelude to Reveille: A Vietnam Awakening
By SD "Sally" Sawyer
Inspired by the author and her husband's real-life experiences, discover the impact of the Vietnam War on one combat platoon leader and his family as they struggle to re-enter The World.
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Description
Lt. Tom Barrington believed fighting in the Vietnam War might be the hardest thing he’d ever be called upon to do. Maybe it wasn't. Maybe coming home was. Prelude to Reveille: A Vietnam Awakening, S.D. Sawyer’s emotionally raw novel, mines the personal histories of returning soldiers like Tom. It presents a hard contrast between the repeatedly tested valor of these heroes and the chilling response to them from this once-proud country. Inspired by real-life experiences of the author and her husband during this turbulent era, the narrative begins in December, 1967, when newlyweds Tom and Meg Barrington reported to his first station, The Old Guard, the Army's ceremonial unit, in Arlington, Virginia. A platoon leader, Tom performed honor burials for fallen soldiers, many killed in Vietnam, most his age or younger. Before receiving orders for Ranger School then Vietnam, Tom patrolled the burning streets of the Nation's Capital during the 1968 riots, and participated in funeral services for assassinated Senator Robert Kennedy. Meg juggled her career as an enthusiastic new teacher with the unfamiliar regulations required of a military spouse. Within a year, her role had transformed into that of a Waiting Wife and a soon-to-be mother. Wounded half-way through his tour, Tom went from combat on a jungle trail in Vietnam to surgery in Japan, to enrollment at a small college back home. Anti-war demonstrations and protests cordoned off him and other veterans from even their peers. Soldiers' pride was quickly replaced with feelings of guilt, anger, and betrayal. Ignored by institutions and support networks that had offered care to returning veterans in past decades, these soldiers could never have prepared for a peacetime home front that would prove as perilous and haunting as the theater of war they had faced in Southeast Asia.
