Nightmares from Vietnam

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
(Free-Press-Release.com) January 7, 2010 -- Imagine Hell as depicted by Hieronymus Bosch: torture, pain, suffering, debauchery and blazing fire. To look at it, this image is not far removed from the war-torn Vietnam as described in Terry P. Rizzuti’s semi-autobiographical novel, The Second Tour.

The book consists, largely, of a collection of harrowing events as remembered by Rizzuti from his 13-month stint as a front-line Marine. The images of suffering and pain that are depicted bring home the horrors of this war, and the pain the soldiers underwent while being reviled by many back home. The experiences are recalled and told through the book’s narrator 27 years after the events, during which time he has not been able to come to terms with how this seemingly short, but excruciatingly intense, chapter of his life has affected him.

Rizzuti narrates the story in a modernist style with disjointed time and place frames. This technique has two advantages. Firstly, it underlines the immediacy of experience in a war zone. Nothing can be predicted or planned. Only the here and now exists. Secondly, it recalls the high period of modernism, around the time of that other futile conflict of the 20th Century, the First World War, when this artistic device was equally used to offer insights into the psychological wounds and spiritual scars of war experience.

Rizzuti was born in Oklahoma in 1946, grew up in New York and joined the Marine Corps in 1966. In May 1967 he was awarded a Purple Heart for shrapnel wounds received. He now lives in Colorado and keeps contact with his military past through various service associations. The Second Tour took him more than twelve years to complete. It is his first novel.

Despite its undisputed literary value, The Second Tour cannot be read as a mere fictional work. In a time when the whole world balance seems to be ready to change face, it serves as a reminder how easily human morality and rationality can be suspended when put under exceptional pressure. Its message goes far beyond the facts described and it builds a natural yet clear link with the current events concerning Iraq and Afghanistan, becoming an important lesson about all wars and their consequences, both on mankind and single human beings.

biography     ISBN 1906755019     Terry P. Rizzuti     The Second Tour     vietnam     War     War fiction book