Reconciliation Road Odyssey: A Family Odyssey of War and Honor

A famous grandfather, one of America's foremost military historians, a brigadier general. His grandson, a new Army Infantry lieutenant. Vietnam. A stand against war. A family ripped apart. This is Reconciliation Road, the story of one man's lifelong commitment to the fight, another man's refusal to fight, and the price they both paid. S. L. A. Marshall's place in history seemed secure. The author of thirty books about war (including Pork Chop Hill and Men Against Fire), a television commentator and syndicated columnist, "Slam" Marshall was said to have seen more combat in the twentieth century than any other American from his own days as a World War I doughboy in France to his several visits to the killing fields of Vietnam. Then, a decade after Marshall's death, a national controversy called his reputation into question. A major article in American Heritage magazine charged him with fraudulent research and falsifying his past, allegations also featured on the front page of the New York Times. Members of the Marshall family were outraged and urged John, S. L. A.'s grandson, to investigate the story. But John Douglas Marshall hesitated, remembering how his grandfather had disowned him after his honorable discharge from the Army as a conscientious objector. Their once-close relationship had become yet another casualty of the war. Reconciliation Road is the story of John Douglas Marshall's odyssey across America in search of the truth about his grandfather and the roots of their bitter split. It resonates with intriguing encounters of people (General William C. Westmoreland, CBS's Mike Wallace, Vietnam writer Larry Heinemann) and places (Fort Benning, the University of Virginia, theMarshall archives in El Paso, Texas, the grave of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., in Atlanta, the Vietnam Veterans' Memorial Wall in Washington, D.C.). Reconciliation Road is one of the few published accounts of a Vietnam conscientious objector, and much more. Part family memoir, part mystery, part road saga, part biography, this is an unforgettable American journey.