`Home' will carry you back to Vietnam era

To those of us growing up in the 1950s, it seemed that World War II happened a long time before, even though barely 10 years had passed. So it's a little amazing that it has been more than 20 years since Vietnam was seared on our consciousness.

If you want to go back for a while or if you want to taste a time you never experienced, "Carry Me Home" is a fine novel that will carry you to the later years of that schizophrenic era.

Del Vecchio introduces us to several veterans returning to a small Pennsylvania town and anguishing when they can't quickly resume their non-military lives. They are all of the group that suffered for a long time, unable to shake the horrors and incongruities that especially accompanied participants in the Vietnam War. This is a story of their cleansing.

Del Vecchio's style is intense, realistic in its ribaldry, and thoughtful in its constant contrasting of the vets' helplessness and their analytic abilities of the war situation.

"Carry Me Home" takes you from quiet rural beauty to modern suburban California, from stoned hippies to VA hospital halls, letting you see how the war kept coming back for some people while around them life went blissfully on into the 1970s and '80s. Although this is the third of a trilogy on America's Southeast Asia era, it stands alone quite well.

Underlying this story are values of land, causes worth living for, family solidarity, fun and hope.

It's set up with one of the veterans Tony Pisano, who is finally on his way to recovery recalling his friends' experiences. Those scene-setting recollections sometimes get in the way of the actual story line. However, re- reading those introductions after finishing the novel they're set off on gray-tinted pages left a nice afterglow.

Copyright 1995
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