About The Chaplain's Assistant
Every soldier returning from war has a unique story to tell of battles fought, ordeals endured, friends lost, and the absurdities that are part and parcel of the killing and mayhem that is warfare. Stories to tell—but who will listen?
The Chaplain’s Assistant: God, Country, and Vietnam, by JT Caldwell.
The Chaplain's Assistant, the debut novel by JT Caldwell, is a different kind of book about war. There are no battles, no heroic feats, no overviews of political and military stratagems, no soaring anti-militaristic rhetoric hidden under the veneer of fiction. Instead, it is a simpler, more human look at the effects of war on the life of an intelligent, naïve young man; a young man who had devoted his life to creating beauty and who found himself in a surreal world surrounded by forces that were beyond his understanding or control.
The novel is about a serious subject, but the tone is far from dreary due to the way Caldwell intersperses humor throughout the book. As one reader stated it, “Like good theater, [he knows] how to push tragedy up against humor to relieve the shock and pain before the audience becomes numb and the lesson lost.”
When the book opens, Bertson has just returned from Italy, where he was performing in an opera at a major music festival. His draft notice arrives, and his years-long struggle to avoid going into the service has failed. Two weeks later, he is inducted into the Army and sent to Fort Knox for Basic Training. It does not take long before he is sure that the Drill Sergeants are trying to kill him.
He volunteers to be a chaplain’s assistant while at Fort Knox, hoping that he will be sent to Germany or some other safe location. These hopes are also doomed, but he and his wife, Kathy, hold on to them through his training at Fort Dix and his time at Fort Hamilton, Brooklyn, where chaplains and assistants are sent. In December, he leaves Fort Hamilton with orders for Vietnam.
He arrives in Vietnam in early January 1970, and leaves in mid-December of the same year. In the totality of a life, one year is a short time. But for Bertson, what he sees, the people he meets, the friends he makes and loses to the war, and his struggles to keep his spirit alive, one year is enough to change him profoundly and forever.
The final chapter, “Postlude,” chronicles his life from the time he returns from active duty until 1986, when the “Welcome Home” events for Vietnam War veterans in New York City opens his eyes and heart to the lasting effects of the war on him and his family. It is his time to finally come home.
Readers have called the book “compelling. . . emotional, profane, sexy and heartbreaking.” A reader who is currently in the military declares that the book “…is a must read for anyone who has served, is serving, or knows someone serving in the Armed Services.” And in the postscript to a private note, a veteran of the Iraq war wrote, “This novel put into words many things that I could not tell my wife. Thank you for speaking up for me.”
In The Chaplain's Assistant: God, Country, and Vietnam, Caldwell is speaking for one reluctant soldier who was in an unpopular war, but the story is stirring the minds and hearts not only of readers who were alive during that era, but also who have came after. This is truly a book for the ages.
