Friendly Fire (ePub)

C. D. B. Bryan (1936-2009) was an award-winning author of nonfiction books, novels, and magazine articles, best known for Friendly Fire, the 1976 Vietnam War-era classic that tells the true story of the transformation of a patriotic Iowa farm family into antiwar activists after their son is killed in Vietnam by artillery fire from friendly forces. After graduating from Yale University, where he was chairman of the campus humor magazine, and serving in the army in Korea, Bryan wrote for the New Yorker, Harper's, Esquire, Rolling Stone, and the New York Times BookReview, and taught writing at Colorado State University and the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. His other works include Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind, an account of his attending an MIT conference on alien abductions and UFOs, and several coffee table books about the National Geographic Society and the National Air and Space Museum, as well as the novels TheGreat Dethriffe and BeautifulWomen, Ugly Scenes.

“The great war stories do not deal solely with the death of soldiers but with the death of idealism, and Bryan’s handling of that theme is certainly the finest that has come out of the Vietnam War.” —The New York Times Book Review
 
“Not since Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood . . . has there been as powerful, as emotional a piece of non-fiction.” —The Washington Star
 
“A gripping tale, a masterpiece . . . Begin this book and you may well not be able to put it down until you have consumed it.” —Cleveland Press
 
“A triumph . . . Bryan has entered an elusive realm of universal truths related to war. . . . He engages us—in a way that no Vietnam polemic or slogan or documentary or drama yet has.” —Chicago Sun-Times
 
“C.D.B. Bryan has dramatized the tragedy [of Vietnam] as it has never been dramatized before. . . . Powerful . . . I found myself close to tears of rage and frustration.” —The New York Times
 
“To read this book is to weep, to despair and ultimately to cheer. . . . It is a work of passionate energy.” —The Washington Post Book World
 
“Writing so fine, so brilliantly done, that it sometimes seems as if Eugene O’Neill were alive and well and practicing journalism.” —The Boston Globe
 
“Great visceral power and emotional impact.” —Publishers Weekly
 
“As close to elemental tragedy as any nonfiction account to come out of the war. Bryan conveys Peg Mullen’s grief and rage with such purity and tact that at times she seems like a Middle Western Antigone.” —Time
 
“Powerfully affecting . . . A dramatic comment on what the war did to America.” —Saturday Review