Patches of Fire: A Story of War and Redemption

French is the author of two well-received novels (Billy; Holly) concerning the African American experience in the South during the 1930s and '40s. In this equally fine memoir, he traces his own transition from Vietnam marine to publisher of a magazine that failed to successful author. The book follows the pattern established after WWI by Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves in seeking to tell ""a story of war"" as a literary construction. Like his predecessors, French employs a spare, almost understated style--a welcome relief from Vietnam narratives that too often seek to make their points by piling on the adjectives. French joined the Marines before the U.S. deployment began. He was seriously wounded as a corporal commanding a machine-gun squad. His post-traumatic stress was not that of a victim, however, but of a leader who felt he had somehow failed by surviving when his men were killed. It surfaced in a context not of race but of economics; it was the collapse of the magazine, Pittsburgh Premier, that brought French's Vietnam demons to the surface--both in their own right and as a focal point for his life as a black man in white America. His account of coming to terms with the war and of his successful turn to writing, first as therapy and then as profession, suggests Graves's Good-Bye to All That. It also brings new perspective to a war generally depicted as a thing in itself, with no afterword beyond trauma. French may have been defined by Vietnam, but he is not ""still in Saigon."" (Jan.)