Coming Home: Dogtag Summer by Elizabeth Partridge

Mom leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. "I'd forgotten how rough it was when you first got here," she said. "Those first few months, I thought we were going to spend our lives trying to coax you out of hiding."

I sat still on the couch after the door shut behind her. Thoughts tumbled around in my head, fell down into the hollow, scooped-out space inside me.

I'd had a home by a wide, tea-colored river. I'd had Grandmother and Ma. Before my baby book started when I was six, before I used to hide in my closet, I'd been a baby to someone else.

The summer between elementary and junior high school only adds to Tracy's feeling of being neither here nor there. But when scavenging for materials to build their own Viking funeral ship, she and her friend Stargazer find an old ammo chest among her father's tools and inside it a pair of Army dogtags and a worn photo of her dad and two Vietnam War buddies, she knows that what is there is part of her feeling of personal limbo.

Her father is furious when he catches them with the box and snatches it away. But like Pandora's box, the ghosts that are released from that place cannot be put back. A river of memories come flooding back in Tracy's mind, no longer hidden in the closet of her mind.

Dad was totally wrong if he thought he could just shove the ammo box on some shelf and life would go on like before. Something had been trapped in the box --maybe hopes and dreams and fears--and now they were out a blowing around us, skittering between us all.

Now the past--her past before she was six and taken to be adopted in California--comes back to Tracy, memories of her mother, who worked for the Americans and came home with presents from the PX and hugs for her only on holidays, of Grandmother, who consoled her when people called her con-lai and whispered that she got her brown hair and light eyes from an American father, and worst of all, how the soldiers of Uncle Ho came, killed her uncle, and took Grandmother away while she hid under the bed, and how the big Americans took her away from the house on the edge of the river. Now Tracy understands her feeling of being separate, somewhere between two places. Stargazer's war-protester father calls her dad a "baby killer" for his role in Vietnam, but the dogtags, with the serial number and blood type of someone named James who was killed by the Vietnamese, still seems to haunt him. Who was this man and what secrets were hidden away in that box? Tracy has to know what they can tell her about the other part of her, that half that was named Tuyet and once lived by a tea-colored river.

Elizabeth Partridge's moving novel, Dogtag Summer (Bloomsbury, 2011) , set in 1980 in the aftermath of that war, testifies to the truth that in a way wars are never over. Suffering from what we now call PTSD, her dad is still fighting a war within over what he did and saw in that war, and Tracy realizes that she, too, carries within herself the contradictions of that war, that the story of that mysterious James and her Vietnamese mother is her story as well., and that she was and is loved by both families, the living and the dead.

Partridge skillfully weaves the flashbacks of her former life with the daily events of Tracy's summer as she makes her separate peace with the ghosts of the past and the spirits of the living. A deeply meaningful book which deserves more acclaim than it has received, Dogtag Summer pairs well with the current National Book Award and Newbery Honor-winning Inside Out and Back Again as poignant and telling records for young adult readers of this period in our history, both as historical novel studies or for an understanding of that war for thoughtful readers.

Phases: Shooting the Moon by Frances O'Roark Dowell

Why, I suddenly wondered, why was TJ sending me pictures of soldiers missing arms and legs?

Why was TJ sending me pictures?

Was he trying to scare me? Or was he just trying to tell me that war wasn't anything like the way we'd dreamed it, playing with our little green Army men under the trees?

It is the summer of 1969, and twelve-year-old Jamie Dexter decides to volunteer at the base PX. Between sessions of digging empty beer cans out from under the pool table and sweeping up peanut shells, she begins a summer-long gin rummy tournament with the PX director Private Hollister. Schooled in all things military and how to play serious gin by her father, the base commander known mostly as "the Colonel," Jamie idolizes her father and in turn her brother TJ, who has enlisted in the Army just out of high school.

Strangely, though, the Colonel seems not to be pleased with TJ's choice. "The Army way is the right way," has always been the family motto, and yet her father urges TJ to revoke his enlistment until the grace period expires and TJ is on his way to Vietnam as a medic. Then, as TJ's letters begin to come home, Jamie is disappointed that he writes only to her parents, talking only of the bad food and the beautiful scenery around his base at Bai Phu. To her he only sends rolls of undeveloped film. Still loyal to her brother, Jamie persuades a troubled Vietnam vet at the PX to teach her to develop the stream of film she continues to receive from her brother.

Jamie is confused by the scenes she sees as she works in the darkroom. Hootches, tired soldiers lying on the ground drinking beer, flowers, and many shots of the moon in different phases come first, but as the summer wears on, the images become darker and more disturbing--medivac copters, stark photos of the newly wounded, haggard, empty faces of exhausted men, fleeing civilians, and always more shots of the moon, sometimes a whole roll of nothing but the moon. As the summer matures, Jamie begins to see why her father wanted to keep her brother safe in college and realizes that for herself as well as for TJ, war has lost its shine and glamour forever.

When Private Hollister confides that he may soon be sent to Vietnam and fears the toll upon his mother if he too dies there like his older brother, Jamie goes to her father and begs him not to sign the orders which will send Hollister to the war zone. Her father says that saving one soldier means putting another in harm's way, and then, in a moment of personal revelation, quietly confesses that he himself had tried to keep TJ from the same fate.

Dowell's timely new coming-of-age novel, Shooting the Moon, is a straightforward depiction of the movement from childhood to maturity. Like a photo slowing gaining detail and focus in the developing solution, Jamie's world view moves from youthful dreams of glory to nuanced meaning in this novel which is a spare yet sharp black and white photograph of the time itself.