Bringing Mulligan Home: The Other Side of the Good War

by Dale Maharidge Narrated by Peter Larkin

Overview

Sgt. Steve Maharidge, like many of his generation, hardly ever talked about the war. The only sign he'd served in it was a single black and white photograph of himself and another soldier tacked to the wall of his basement workshop.

After Steve Maharidge's death, his son Dale, now an adult, began a twelve-year quest to understand his father's preoccupation with the photo. What had happened during the battle for Okinawa, and why had his father remained silent about his experiences and the man in the picture, Herman Mulligan? In his search for answers, Maharidge sought out the survivors of Love Company, many of whom had never before spoken so openly and emotionally about what they saw and experienced on Okinawa.

In Bringing Mulligan Home, Maharidge delivers an affecting narrative of war and its aftermath, of fathers and sons, with lessons for the children whose parents are returning from war today.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

Helen Benedict, author of The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women Serving in Iraq and Sand Queen
“Through deep and sensitive interviewing, Dale Maharidge has achieved what many have previously thought impossible: he has opened up the "silent generation" of World War Two veterans and enabled them to tell their stories. These veterans, US marines and Japanese who met as enemies in the Pacific, are no mythologized heroes or villains, but flesh-and-blood humans describing the true horror that has always been, and always will be, war. Maharidge enables these survivors to speak of the war with such honesty that they strip away all its glamour, break your heart and win it all at once. Part memoir, part vivid history, part a searing examination of war trauma, Bringing Mulligan Home gives us an entirely fresh look at "The Good War" that may well change our view of it forever.”

Kirkus
“A moving memoir. . .A powerful narrative of the dark side of American combat in the Pacific theater and the persistence of resulting injuries decades after the war ended.”

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Rhodes
“Gripping and unforgettable—a son’s search for his father in the shattered ruins of the Pacific War”


New York Post

Minneapolis Star Tribune

A powerful narrative of the dark side of American combat in the Pacific theater and the persistence of resulting injuries decades after the war ended.”
—Kirkus

Library Bookwatch

Portrays not only the battles of war, but the lasting impact they had on the lives of those who served, and the dark memories they would have to carry for the rest of their lives. Highly recommended.”
—Library Bookwatch

BookPage

Excellently performed by Pete Larkin.”
—BookPage

Kirkus Reviews

The story of a distinguished journalist's search for his father's war. Pulitzer Prize winner Maharidge's (Journalism/Columbia Univ.; Homeland, 2011, etc.) father was a Marine sergeant who fought on Okinawa, where he suffered brain damage in an explosion that killed one of the men in his command, Herman Mulligan. Among the souvenirs the elder Maharidge brought home was an omnipresent photograph of himself and Mulligan, as well as sporadic explosive rages that terrified the author throughout his childhood. Maharidge received no diagnosis or treatment for his injury and refused to talk about the war to the end of his days. After his death, the author, "a person obsessed with the past and what I could not heal," set out to discover the truth about his father's wartime experiences, learn who Mulligan was and, if possible, locate his inexplicably unidentified gravesite. He conducted interviews with almost 30 elderly members of his father's company, and he presents 12 of them at length. He also traveled to Okinawa to visit the site of his father's injury and meet with civilian survivors of the battle in an effort to lay his father's demons to rest. The result is a moving memoir of the war by someone who wasn't there but who suffered from wartime injuries just as surely as his father had. The veterans' interviews are sensitively conducted, powerful and disturbing, graphic descriptions of brutal and largely unnecessary combat with a suicidally determined enemy, and frank accounts of atrocities committed by both sides. Equally importantly, some also explore the men's difficulties in re-entering civilian life, placing in context the elder Maharidge's often unsuccessful struggles to live with his experiences among people who could not imagine or understand them. A powerful narrative of the dark side of American combat in the Pacific theater and the persistence of resulting injuries decades after the war ended.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940171333508
Publisher:	HighBridge Company
Publication date:	03/12/2013
Edition description:	Unabridged

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