Dear Son

A Father's Vietnam

By: William Ferrier Jr.

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

June 1967. Joseph Ward watches his nineteen-year-old son board a bus to Fort Polk, Louisiana. It's the last time he'll see Daniel as a boy.

For the next nineteen months, Joseph fights a war from his driveway in Kokomo, Indiana—checking the mailbox twice daily, watching Walter Cronkite count casualties, drinking alone in the basement while his son screams through nightmares eight thousand miles away.

This is not another soldier's story.

This is the war nobody writes about: the fathers who stood helpless while their sons walked into the jungle. The mothers who slept in empty bedrooms. The families who survived the waiting, only to discover that bringing a son home alive and bringing him home whole are two different things.

Told entirely through letters—some mailed to Vietnam, some written but never sent, some read together twenty-five years later—Dear Son is a devastating portrait of love, helplessness, and the impossible distance between a father who would die for his son and a son who's already dying in ways his father can't see.

For readers who loved:

• The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien
• Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes
• The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah

Perfect for fans of:

• Vietnam War fiction with emotional depth
• Father-son relationships tested by impossible circumstances
• Epistolary novels that reveal what can't be said aloud
• Historical fiction that explores the home front
• Literary fiction about trauma, healing, and what we owe each other