This tale of multi-generational in-fighting and dark love is based on three generations of a family's experiences with war and loss and and how they cope. Big Walt is a WWII hero, his son Walt an honorably discharged solider from Vietnam, and Walt's nephew, Tom Jane, a thirty-year-old career soldier dishonorably discharged.
Each man requires saving, each man tries to outrun or avoid the proferred olive branch, and ultimately, each character falls victim to his own internal war. The relationships are tangled and desperately complex, and in his fashion, the author attempts to relate these personal connections by using flashbacks and italicized print to represent these time-shifting moments. If you fail to recognize the change in typeface, you fall hard and fast into the abyss of the story development, and it often times requires the re-reading of a paragraph or even an entire chapter to crawl back to ground level.
But it is a dangerous and terse tale and well worth the challenge.