Born in 1978. That means the uncles and the friends' dads and the teachers at school were all Vietnam. Not as history — as the men in the room.
Some talked. They would tell a young kid things they would not say to other adults: the crazy adventures, the noise, the heat, the things that happened that had no clinical name yet. Others never spoke and you learned to read that silence as its own kind of information. One high school teacher had what everyone now calls PTSD. Nobody called it anything then. He just snapped one day in class and the room understood immediately that he had been carrying something for a long time and it had gotten too heavy.
The college roommate was Iraq. He would talk about it over late nights — Fallujah, the dust, the specific texture of that war. Sad and heroic and completely impossible to summarize. The kind of storytelling you only get when someone is not performing for an audience, just reporting to a person they trust.
A good friend was killed in Fallujah. Jen Harris. Helicopter pilot. That is not a detail that fades.
Knew war photographers too, later, when shooting fashion and learning the craft. People who went to the places the war went. Never took that road. Too sad — on both sides, both the shooter and the subject. But knowing those people changed how you look at images of conflict, what it costs to make them, what it costs to appear in them.
The position going into all three of these series: pacifist. Anti-war, not anti-soldier. The Vietnamese did not deserve what happened to them. The soldiers sent to do it did not deserve what happened to them either. The Iraqis did not deserve it. The men and women sent there did not deserve what they came home with. Those two truths are not in conflict. War manages to wrong almost everyone it touches, which is why it keeps producing the best stories.
The Approach
These books are pulp. That is not an apology — it is the strategy.
Nam comics first. The ones that understood Vietnam as atmosphere and poetry before they understood it as politics. Platoon. Apocalypse Now. Tour of Duty. The music, which is its own argument about what an era felt like from the inside. The Things They Carried, which showed what the literary version of this material could do when someone was willing to carry the weight without sentimentality.
Short chapters. Fast movement. Frazetta-energy covers from Krea — heat and jungle and desert and colonial gunpowder, each series visually distinct, each one built outward from the image. The writer can write, can shoot photography, had bands that played real rooms. Cannot draw. AI imagery filled that gap: describe the vision, the tool realizes it, sometimes what comes back surpasses what you imagined. The covers across all three series look like what pulp always wanted to be and rarely got the budget for.
The goal was always: adventure, not advertisement. Gritty and real without pretending to be a true account. The veterans and soldiers whose lives and stories informed this work would recognize the distinction immediately. Most of them would probably be glad someone thought their war was worth a story.
Hell's Glory — Vietnam
Hell's Glory is the one that landed hardest with readers and felt most natural to write. The material had been accumulating since childhood — overheard in living rooms, at kitchen tables, in the charged silences of men who came back to New York City and did not quite fit back into it.
The heroin and the alcohol were everywhere in the city in the 1980s. A lot of it was Vietnam. You grow up around men who survived something and then came home to a country that did not want to hear about it, and you understand early that certain kinds of damage get handed down whether you ask for them or not.
The book hit the mark. A different audience than most of the other work — people who came from the same background, people who lost someone, people who knew what the war sounded like from the inside of a family that carried it. They found it and recognized it.
If these books do well enough, the plan is to put something back. Free seeds — cannabis specifically — for veterans who want help getting off the opiates that the VA handed out for decades. Growing something. A different relationship with the body than what the war and the inadequate treatment left behind.
