Meditations in Green — Stephen Wright

One of the greatest Vietnam War novels ever written, by an award-winning writer who experienced it firsthand.
Deployed to Vietnam with the U.S. Army's 1069 Intelligence Group, Spec. 4 James Griffin starts out clear-eyed and hardworking, believing he can glide through the war unharmed. But the kaleidoscope of horrors he experiences gets inside him relentlessly. He gradually collapses and ends up unstrung, in step with the exploding hell around him and waiting for the cataclysm that will bring him home, dead or not.
Griffin survives, but back in the U.S. his battles intensify. Beset by addiction, he takes up meditating on household plants and attempts to adjust to civilian life and beat back the insanity that threatens to overwhelm him.
Meditations in Green is a haunting exploration of the harrowing costs of war and yet-unhealed wounds, "the impact of an experience so devastating that words can hardly contain it" (Walter Kendrick, the New York Times Book Review). Through passages gorgeous, agonizing, and surreal, Stephen Wright paints a searing portrait of a nation driven to the brink by violence and deceit.