Derived of the author's Vietnam War experience, the thirty-seven stories in this sometimes harrowing, sometimes hilarious collection look back at the Vietnam War from a distance of forty or more years, nearly a half-century, and via the perspectives of not only the soldiers themselves, but also their children, spouses, siblings, parents, friends. Nothing comparable to this collection exists within the literature growing out of the Vietnam War. NAM is hardly just another batch of macho war stories. These short fictions, most of them memoir-based, neither glorify nor even excuse war but come forward instead as eloquent testament to the tragic lunacy of it.