Prompted by a just-published book that holds ex-lieutenant Ben Tyson accountable for a hushed-up massacre committed by his platoon in a Hue hospital 18 years before, the army recalls Tyson to stand trial for murder. Certainly this is true of all good war novels because war novels by their nature are parables, and parables are instructive and, hopefully, memorable.If fiction can assuage the lingering moral pain of the Vietnam War, it's through the kind of driving honesty coupled with knowledgeability that DeMille (By the Rivers of Babylon) employs here, in a story which, as riveting as The Caine Mutiny but with wider implications, probes the conflicting concepts of honor, duty and loyalty as they relate to an event of the My Lai varietyand assesses blame. This might suggest that fiction can sometimes be more educational than fact. The same, I think, can be said for other classic war novels, such as The Red Badge of Courage, All Quiet on the Western Front, or War and Peace.
I still have more vivid memories of these two fictional accounts of the Second World War than I have of the textbook readings or the military memoirs that I struggled through. I recall that in a college class I took in the 1960s dealing with the Second World War, I was required to read two novels: Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead and Irwin Shaw's The Young Lions. Interestingly, Word of Honor, though fiction, is assigned reading in some college courses about the Vietnam War. This last fact is what most pleases an author: the knowledge that new generations are reading and hopefully appreciating and learning something from his novel.
Word of Honor was published to wide critical acclaim was a Main Selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club was sold to Hollywood, where it passed through a series of producers and screenwriters who couldn't seem to get it right was translated into two dozen foreign languages in Europe and Asia was put into audiobook form and has been in continuous print since its debut.
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