When Hirsch Came Home from the War by Walt Lamberg

In 1969, when Sergeant E-5 William Hirschfield, “Hirsch” to his friends, comes home, he feels a great sense of relief, but he feels somewhat “out of it.” It isn’t just the jet lag after the flight from South Korea, where he had completed a thirteen-month combat tour of duty.

In spite of the Korean Armistice Agreement signed in 1953, Hirsch discovered that there was some kind of war still going on in Korea. Some called it a “low intensity conflict,’ in contrast to the very high intensity conflict occurring in Vietnam. Hirsch’s first sergeant called it “the Second Korean War.”

Hirsch discovered something else. His unit was run not by the commanding officer or the first sergeant, but by a warrant officer, who was the intelligence operations officer. This person had three vices: He drank too much. When he drank, he talked in a loud voice. When he drank and talked in a loud voice, he expressed his hatred for blacks, Catholics, and Jews. The fact that there were many blacks, Catholics, and Jews serving in the U.S. Army didn’t seem to matter.

Hirsch has two weeks leave before his next assignment. He spends much of it trying without success to avoid thinking of Korea. He spends time remembering his life as a civilian, particularly his childhood and his family and friends. He reaches the conclusion that he had grown up in a dysfunctional family and then had been assigned to a dysfunctional Army unit in a dysfunctional war.

[This ebook is a full length novel with 211 pages. This is the first in a planned series of novels about Hirsch, his experiences in the Army and his relationships with relatives.]