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Stand in the Fire - Three American Soldiers and Their Wars, 1900-1950 (Paperback)
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Stand in the Fire - Three American Soldiers and Their Wars, 1900-1950 (Paperback)
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From the first shot fired by his grandfather on a jungle trail in
1903 to the day his father captured plans for the Chinese invasion
of South Korea, William Crawford Woods’s family has fought in
nearly every American war of the twentieth century. Drawing on his
family’s letters, journals, official records, and other artifacts
found in his grandmother’s attic, Woods has revived their
stories—accounts of his grandfather, who served in the Philippine
War and World War I; of his uncle, who rose from a West Point cadet
to staff command in the 11th Airborne and died in action in the
Battle of Manila in World War II; and of his own father, who
transformed himself from a sedentary lawyer into a soldier and a
spy. To lighten the dramatic and emotional load of his family’s
service, Woods occasionally calls on memories of his own time in
the army, which he calls “brief, bloodless, and largely
comic.”Woods fortifies this work of nonfiction with his skills as
a novelist, crafting dramatic scenes and engaging dialog, offering
far more than operational battlefield stories. He explores the
wider impact of war, as we learn of his grandfather’s struggles
with his wife’s patrician parents; his uncle’s involvement with
Cy Caldwell, a superstar aviator of the 1930s; and his father’s
swift ascent from civilian to counterspy. Stand in the Fire is both
an engrossing chronicle of a family who served in every American
conflict from the Philippine War to the Cold War and a profoundly
personal window into a family’s patriotic inheritance. This
intimately documented history vividly conveys successive
generations’ personal calls to serve, tells the stories of their
paths to selfhood through military experience, and reflects on how
they found fulfillment and adventure in their service, as well as
evasion of the domestic scene. Woods has skillfully created a
memoir about the construction of memory forged in military service
and American masculinity. Stand in the Fire is a powerful
exploration of the love between fathers and sons and an attempt to
honor family valor. “I became aware of a debt to my ancestors I
felt I could discharge by writing this book,” Woods writes. “It
was a way of keeping faith with those ancestors.”
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