"The Moral Life of Soldiers: the American Education of a People's Army
Officer" is a novel-as-memoir related by an elderly officer from the
People's Army of Viet Nam, recalling his experience in the American
army's Special Forces before the Vietnam War. The story is an
investigation into a soldier's decision to take up arms against his
former comrades. On another level, it is about the relations between
men, and between men and women. And it is about the costs of love that
one must sometimes pay. The novella, "Paul's Father," is set in Georgia
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 among their white neighbors, and the compromises
they resist making.