Dear Mr. President [Hardcover]

Gabe Hudson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 20, 2002

In the classic American tradition of subversive war narratives such as Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse-Five, a powerful new voice captures our attention with seven stories and a novella that take on the Gulf War with audacity, narrative brilliance, savage humor, and startling emotional resonance.

Dear Mr. President introduces a cast of conflicted characters whose efforts to cope with their experiences at war are both funny and tragic. In "The Cure as I Found It," an army infantryman who fought along the Highway of Death returns home with a form of Gulf War Syndrome and a great deal of guilt. He practices getting into Heaven through visualization. In the title story, "Dear Mr. President"-which was featured in The New Yorker's Debut Fiction issue of 2001-a Gulf War vet appeals to the first President Bush for help after his wife decides she has had enough. In "Cross-Dresser," a stealth fighter pilot in the neuropsych ward of a VA hospital begs to be re-
admitted to active duty, after justifying, with impeccable logic, his recent behavior. In "Notes from a Bunker Along Highway 8," a Green Beret assigned to the task of hunting SCUDs around Baghdad deserts his team after seeing a strange vision. He takes up residence with a fellow soldier in a deserted Iraqi bunker, where he proceeds to give medical aid to refugees, only to discover that being helpful is more complicated than he may have anticipated.

These electrifying stories illuminate in wholly unexpected ways the intimate experience of the Gulf War, a hallucinatory blink in the American consciousness. Dear Mr. President marks the debut of a sensational comic writer of fierce courage and originality.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The Gulf War may not be the sort of glamorous conflict that lends itself to shoot-'em-up war fiction, but the Middle East face-off does seem ideal fodder for the eight darkly comic, military gothic short stories in Hudson's first collection. "The Cure as I Found It" is a twisted yarn about a vet with Gulf War syndrome who finds peace only after confronting a Brooklyn neighborhood thug who killed his cat. "Cross Dresser" takes the form of a former POW's letter to his shrink after he switches bodies with his 13-year-old daughter to elude his Iraqi tormentors. The title story is a humorous ode to the power of biological warfare as a soldier begins to grow a third ear on his torso after returning home. In "Woman in Uniform," a soldier muses about a female soldier in his squad as well as his nymphomaniac ex-girlfriend while his unit becomes enmeshed in a My Lai-like incident. The best and most complex story is the wonderfully weird "Notes From a Bunker Along Highway #8," which deals with a soldier who saves a fallen comrade and suddenly deserts his unit, only to become trapped in a bunker with a discarded group of chimps. Hudson, a former marine reserves rifleman, displays a brilliantly macabre sense of humor, a fine ear for military and bureaucratic cliches and abundant compassion for his quirky, bruised characters. This is a fine debut that may remind readers of George Saunders.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Hudson was featured in a recent issue of The New Yorker devoted to promising young fiction writers, and this honor is richly deserved; his harrowing, courageous, darkly humorous collection of stories about the Gulf War may very well prove to be the equal of Tim O'Brien's celebrated Vietnam collection, The Things They Carried. What is perhaps most noteworthy about Hudson's work is its fearlessness. He clearly wants us to see that the Gulf War was not the painless, "surgical" event that it may have appeared to be on TV. Hudson's soldiers react to their traumatic combat experiences in a variety of ways, but the most debilitating damage they sustain is psychological. As they try unsuccessfully to return to civilian life, they find that the margins between nightmare and reality, the real and the surreal, have become painfully blurred. For instance, the protagonist in "The Cure as I Found It" copes with his guilt by practicing visualization to get into Heaven. Hudson's hip, ironic voice helps create stories that resonate with disturbing poignancy. An impressive collection; enthusiastically recommended for all libraries.
Patrick Sullivan, Manchester Community Coll., CT
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 178 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; 1st edition (August 20, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375413952
• ISBN-13: 978-0375413957
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.8 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.3 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #160,613 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Heartbreaking yet funny, March 19, 2003

By 

E. Haynes "eek35" (Austin, TX United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Dear Mr. President (Hardcover)

These stories are about people I might have gone to high school with. It's so wierd to think that my contemporaries are veterans, and now there's a new bunch of kids going over to Iraq who are younger than my little brother & sister.

But here they are in all their human strength and frailty. Fictional, yes, but every writer uses his experiences and those of his friends to color their fictional world.

This book is far more readable and approachable than Catch-22 or Going after Cacciato, Apocalypse Now, and other war-genre stories to which it has been compared. Perhaps this is due to the contemporary nature of the stories, or maybe it's just because the writer captures character so well with dialogue
and action. This is a very quick, captivating read.

These stories have a huge dose of irony among the realistic snapshots of what the first Gulf War was like up-close. This is not the war we saw on CNN, this is more like Vietnam in the desert, where a confrontation with a few belligerent locals can turn into a landmine and booby-trap ridden massacre.

War veterans come home and can't forget their lives on the front lines. Minds snap, but their hearts are still in the right place. Chemical warfare takes its toll on veterans' bodies in different, horrible ways. Iraquis know just enough of our culture to get it wrong. You kill someone in order to save them. Your life back home goes to hell while you're living in hell on the front lines.

You have to laugh or you'd cry.

Read this.

11 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Veteran Speaks, November 16, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Dear Mr. President (Hardcover)

I served in the Gulf, and not only has Mr. Hudson completely nailed that war to a tee, he also has a serious bead on human nature. I think it'll be a couple years before people truly see the historical importance of this book, but I am willing to say that this might be the most important book published this year. Mr. Hudson, through dark humor and wild story-telling, addresses issues such as Biological warfare, the little publicized psychological effects of modern war, the Bush administration's lust for war, the tenuous relationship between the Middle East and the West, America's lust for oil, the White House's utilization of mainstream media as a propaganda tool (especially CNN--anyone who served in that war will know what I am talking about), the hypocrisy inherent in America's foreign policy, gays in the military, the failure of American Intelligence, Gulf War Syndrome, the way that each generation heaps its war stories on the younger generation (namely the relationship between the Vietnam generation and the Gulf War generation), and the role that technology plays in modern warfare. Most importantly, though, it shows the human side to a war that was largely censored, and has been perceived by the American public as virtual and sanitary. And while Mr. Hudson is clearly opposed to war, he is just as quick to lampoon the Doves as he is the Hawks. It's rapidly becoming one of the most talked about books in the veteran message boards, a favorite of both young and old. I laughed a lot, sure, but I was also, somehow, very moved. It brought a lot of stuff back. It gave me a way to think about things I had previously not been able to think about. Thank you Mr. Hudson for your courage and bravery--for giving a voice to a group of men and women who have been largely marginalized and swept under the carpet by the government--especially now that Bush II wants to go make more of a mess over in Iraq. I cannot recommend this book highly enough, for civilians and veterans.

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a clear voice, May 1, 2003

By 

william clarke (Chicago, IL) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Dear Mr. President (Hardcover)

I picked up this book because I read Hudson's short piece in the New Yorker (from one of the summer fiction issues) and loved it. Gabe Hudson writes with clarity, creativity, and great confidence. Of course, this book is bound to make some people irritated ... but that should not reflect at all the great voice of this young writer. Highly recommended, even for those who are wary of Hudson and his sense of humor (have some of the people ... never heard of sarcasm, wit, and facetiousness?).