Why this Vietnam-era novel is an essential gut-check for our current military surge

On June 18, 1965, a photo on the front page of the New York Times forever changed the trajectory of my life. I was an angsty 14-year-old, sprawled on the white shag carpet of my parents’ Upper East Side apartment, mesmerized by a photo taken by Horst Fass in a place called Vietnam. The cute guy in the picture was young enough to be my boyfriend! Those eyes! That smile! Across his helmet the boy had printed “War is Hell.” What war? I wondered. And where on Earth was Vietnam?

That photo turned the dial of my life’s direction 180 degrees and sent me off into the world to find out.

Today, that helmet is displayed at the National Museum of American History. That boy, 19-year-old Larry Wayne Chaffin, was dishonorably discharged for his protest. He went home to St. Louis, joined the antiwar movement, and died at 39 from exposure to Agent Orange, leaving behind a wife and five kids. And that 14-year-old girl? Since I met Larry’s eyes 60 years ago, I’ve been voting with my feet in the streets. Nowadays I can be seen marching in DTLA wearing T-shirts saying phrases like “No Kings Since 1776.”

In the 50 years since the fall of Saigon brought the 20-year-long Vietnam War to a denouement as tragic as its duration, many books have depicted the nightmare of that (first but not last) “forever war,” notably Kristin Hannah’s 2024 bestseller “The Women;” Viet Thanh Nguyen’s 2015 Pulitzer Prize winner “The Sympathizer” and Tim O’Brien’s 1990 collection “The Things They Carried.”

“In the Fields of Fatherless Children,” the second novel from Appalachia native and “Greasewood Creek” author Pamela Steele, is neither about nor set in the Vietnam War. This taut, lyrical book is about the poverty, racism, environmental degradation, and despair suffered in an Appalachian “holler” during the Vietnam era, when the war is devouring the community’s young men and climate change is debasing the landscape and its residents’ way of life. The war is a distant drumbeat, its threat ever audible to Steele’s underemployed, eminently draftable characters from 9,000 miles away. “In the Fields of Fatherless Children,” the publisher writes: “examines the long shadow cast by the Vietnam War. Not just on the battlefield, but on the women, children, and rural communities that were left behind.”

The rural community of the book is a West Virginia mining hamlet. The novel’s women and children include 16-year-old June Branahan; June’s newborn daughter, Grace; her mother, Bethel; her Aunty Beauty; and her deceased Granny Justice, who watches over, and sometimes narrates, the fates of her living kin.

The principal male characters are June’s beloved brother, Tom; June’s true love and Grace’s “mixed-blood” father, Ellis; June’s stepfather, Isom; and Ellis’ father, Solomon. Crucial to the intricately woven plot is the bitter feud between Isom and Solomon, fueled by Isom’s racism and a long-buried secret that bonds the two men in mutual hate.

Ellis and Tom are shipped off to Vietnam, leaving June and her newborn with June’s mom and aunt. The morning after giving birth, June awakens in her bed to find her baby gone; Bethel and Beauty are at the kitchen table in tears.

Where’s the baby? June asked.

Beauty reached for June’s hand, said, Come set down.

June stiffened, a pillar of ice. She could not breathe for the sheer need that overtook her then — something entirely new that turned her inside out.

Where is my baby?

Beauty said, Gone, honey.

[June] looked at her mother and asked, She’s dead?

Bethel shook her head, said, No.

Beauty finished the sentence for her. Isom took her, she said.

From that point in the novel to its wrenching end, June searches for her baby with the passionate abandon of a first-time mother and the aching hunger of every mother separated from her child. In thrall to her mission, June rents a dusty, disheveled storage room in town.

“How long has it been since someone lived here?” June asks the landlady, who answers, “Kid who lived here got drafted.”

June’s next words come out in a rush: “My brother got killed in Vietnam.” It was the first time she had said it to a stranger.

“Theys lots of boys getting killed. I still don’t know what become of the boy who lived here, though I heard he was killed too.”

Steele draws out June’s search and the mother-and-child reunion at a pace that is both realistic and artful. “Pamela Steele knows how to name the confounding world around us,” fellow Appalachian author Glenn Taylor praised Steele’s new novel. “She has listened closely to the voices most have forgotten.”

As I write this, Gestapo-like “special agents” are kidnapping, torturing and killing citizens on American streets. Amid the double despair of soaring joblessness and inflation, the 2025 U.S. military saw the biggest enlistee surge in 13 years, exceeding their recruitment goals by 10%. Absent congressional approval — or even advance notice — the U.S. president continues to threaten military strikes against Iran after threatening to to level a “whole civilization,” acts of war reminiscent of the illegal 1964 Gulf of Tonkin attack that launched the Vietnam War.

Now more than ever, we need books such as “In the Fields of Fatherless Children,” to help us make sense of, and right, our upside-down world. We need books that amplify the voices of the forgotten, including the millions of soldiers and civilians — 58,200 of them Americans — who died in the Vietnam War. Most of all, we need books that remind us of the history our current government wants us to forget, so we can keep them from repeating it.

Maran, author of “The New Old Me” and other books, lives in a Silver Lake bungalow that’s even older than she is.

See Maran live at the L.A. Times Festival of Books at USC on April 19, 1-2 p.m., at the panel “Inspired by True Events: Historical Fiction that Shines a Light on Overlooked Stories,” which also features authors Paula McLain, Milo Todd and Kristin Harmel. Free; tickets required.

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