Sergeant Back Again:

by Charles Coleman

Book Overview

Experience the Vietnam War through the eyes and experiences of US Army surgical medic Andy Collins as he and his medical team are overwhelmed first by the wounded and shattered casualties of combat, and later as victims of their own obsessions to save as many lives as possible. This story probes the dark, psychological struggles of the human mind and body as it strives to retain a sense of sanity in a world gone mad with mind-shattering repercussions...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0060108649
• ISBN13: 9780060108649
• Release Date: January 1980
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Length: 237 Pages

Customer Reviews

Excellent Portrayal of Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome

REVIEW BY GEORGE KEARNS, HUDSON REVIEW The strongest, best-written novel by a new writer I have seen for a very long time is Charles Coleman's "Sergeant Back Again." Coleman, who served as a medic in Vietnam and later in the mental wards at Chambers Pavilion, Fort Sam Houston, the scene of his book, tells us in the Foreword: "I did not make this story: it came to me that way, ready-made, defined by historical circumstances, generated by the soldiers who have had to fight the most insidious and intimate battle: the one with yourself. . . . In writing this book I am mainly a chronicler who was left no choice but to try to speak for the inarticulate, the psychically scarred, and the wasted . . . . It is a synthesis of personal experiences, observations, interviews, and journals here woven together into a narrative." The central figure is Specialist Andrew Collins, a medic who began deeply to identify with his wounded patients in Vietnam, worked with the ESR (Every Soldier's Responsibility, an anti-war movement), released to the Press documents about torture and murder of prisoners, and wrote a series of letters addressed to himself by the voices of American dead and wounded. The novel begins with Collins deeply withdrawn, muttering indecipherable phrases ("Sergeant back again"), and traces his return to a perilous sanity--a matter of choice the book suggests--so that he can return like Ishmael to tell the tale, just as Coleman is doing in speaking for the traumatized. Collins is very intelligent; and Coleman brilliantly shows how madness does not cancel out intelligence, how the insane can be aware of their insanity, can retain a clear, even comic vision of the insanity around them. This is a very tough book, avoiding any trace of sentimentality or of reverse sentimentality. Its persistent comedy is justified in that the patient/prisoners themselves produce it and are aware if it. Coleman's scenes are never static presentations; he is a master of narrative rhythms, of allowing each scene to develop and move unpredictably. Sergeant Back Again is a comic novel about evil without a villain, and avoids any easy irony (such as that the insane are really sane, that the officially sane among us are in fact insane, anything like that). I have not read all the books that have come out of the Vietnam War, but I can't imagine there will be one finer or more moving. GK BY PHILIP D. BEIDLER in AMERICAN LITERATURE and the EXPERIENCE OF VIETNAM Charles Coleman's Sergeant Back Again, a challenging, intelligent, painful book, is about the war-haunted inmates of a psycho ward in a Stateside army medical center, and about their attempts, some successful and some monstrously failed, to put off the madness of the war that has in one way or another seized them to the farthest depths of being. With regard to Sergeant Back Again, more than one writer commented on the sense of profound experiential authority that pervaded the narrative, seemed in fact its most compell