Remembering Heaven's Face

John Balaban recounts his time spent during the war in South Vietnam with heart-wrenching accuracy and tenderness, bringing the landscape and the people there into sharp focus. I volunteered to go to Vietnam, but as a conscientious objector to war. . . . While most of these events took place in the midst of the war, this is not exactly a story about the war, but a story of rescue. Most of the children I helped save—scalped, burned, blasted, or shot when I found them—are now adults, parents or even grandparents themselves. . . . And while many of my funny, wise, reckless, young American friends of those days are dead, what they did and what they learned is not. It is as if all of us were being watched, all of us journeying under a brilliant blue sky that is the face of heaven.—from the preface