Paco's Story

“Resonates with a devastating and bitter irony. . . . Heinemann writes about the workingman’s Vietnam, exceptional for its bleak, shared, unexceptional reality. This is the war, no question, and there is no escape.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer

“Larry Heinemann is . . . the grunt’s novelist of the Vietnam War. His is the storytelling of a life and death between the laager and the treeline, a life of dirt, fear, dope, alcohol, brutality, curses, and evil.” —The Washington Post Book World

“Paco’s Story deserves a place among the best Vietnam war novels.” —Providence Sunday Journal

“Larry Heinemann tells this story as if talking aloud, at times a hip, cynical patter that contains the bitterness Paco never speaks. . . . A fiction that rings truer than factual accounts.” —The Boston Globe

“Even if Platoon were a great movie instead of just a good one, I don’t think it would approach the lingering emotional effects of Paco’s Story. I shook Platoon after one day; I still haven’t shaken the novel.” –Chicago Sun-Times

“Do not read Paco’s Story unless you are prepared to find yourself bitterly wanting to cry. The tears, if they come, will be for the ghosts of Vietnam. Paco’s Story is brave and terrible.” —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“This is strong, heart-wrenching stuff by one of America’s most important living authors.” -Robert Mason, author of Chickenhawk

“Paco’s Story, brief and with a remarkable intensity, presses the social claims of those who died literally, and those who survived but whose history, for all the place it has today, might as well be dead.” –Los Angeles Times

“A novel of such terrible power, it puts Heinemann in the company of the finest American writers…You have never read anything like Paco’s Story.” -Gloria Emerson

“Paco’s Story is eerie, powerful, and convincing.” -Tracy Kidder

“Powerfully evocative….The language is visceral and compelling, the scenes vivid and highly detailed, while the rolling narrative resembles an emotional minefield.” —The Boston Herald

“A harsh, bitter novel that tears its way into the mind and refuses to leave.” –The Chattanooga Times

“A tale for the workingman, filled with bitter ironies, gritty dialogue and an introspective sense of what is happening to one man in one private hell.” —Richmond-Times Dispatch