Sergeant Back Again [Hardcover]

Charles Coleman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 1980

Experience the Vietnam War through the eyes and experiences of US Army surgical medic Andy Collins as he and his medical team are overwhelmed first by the wounded and shattered casualties of combat, and later as victims of their own obsessions to save as many lives as possible. This story probes the dark, psychological struggles of the human mind and body as it strives to retain a sense of sanity in a world gone mad with mind-shattering repercussions. Flawlessly written in the genre of the American war novel, it has been critically acclaimed as the One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest of the Vietnam War.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Charles Coleman's unprecedented novel, Sergeant Back Again, was first published by Harper & Row in 1980, following his graduation in 1977 with a Doctor of Philosophy in English Literature and Distinguished Dissertation from the State University of New York at Binghamton (Drs. W. Stein, R. Kroetsch, and M. Corrigan Dissertation Directors and members of the D&E Committee). Sergeant Back Again is internationally recognized as the very first rendering of what would emerge to become the diagnosis of post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSS) and, later, as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), cited by literary critic and author, Philip Beidler as "The Vietnam Novel that Made PTSD Real!" Go to: www.sergeantbackagain.com Following his graduation from SUNY-Binghamton, Charles accepted an appointment in 1978 at Southeastern Massachusetts University (now U-Mass Dartmouth) teaching courses in gerontology and geriatrics while serving as the Board-of-Trustees-appointed Sr. Grants and Contracts Administrator for a Department of Health & Human Services Title XX De-Institutionalization & Psychiatric Outreach Program for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Today, Charles is Adjunct Assistant Professor, Health Policy & Management, Gillings School of Global Public Health, School of Public Health, University of North Carolina (UNC), Chapel Hill; also, Visiting Scholar and member of The Board of Visitors at UNC, Chapel Hill, where he is a certificate candidate in the School of Public Health; Adjunct Associate Professor, Department of Emergency Medicine, School of Medicine, UNC, Chapel Hill; with an Adjunct Faculty appointment to the College of Engineering and Computer Sciences at North Carolina State University; and lecturer on biomedical informatics and clinical data management and analytics at the Institute for Advanced Analytics, also at North Carolina State University. His latest novel, Do No Harm: The Co-ed Conspiracy and Why They Died, is another intriguing, landmark novel portraying the survivors of PTSD, in this case an Army surgeon who returns from the field hospitals in Vietnam and struggles to find himself in civilian practice as a psychiatrist attempting to treat patients similarly scarred by trauma, but for alarmingly different reasons. Charles can be contacted at www.sergeantbackagain.com. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 237 pages
• Publisher: Harper & Row; 1st edition (December 1980)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060108649
• ISBN-13: 978-0060108649
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,673,513 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Portrayal of Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome, January 16, 2009

By 

George Kearns - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Sergeant Back Again (Paperback)

REVIEW BY GEORGE KEARNS, HUDSON REVIEW

The strongest, best-written novel by a new writer I have seen for a very long time is Charles Coleman's "Sergeant Back Again." Coleman, who served as a medic in Vietnam and later in the mental wards at Chambers Pavilion, Fort Sam Houston, the scene of his book, tells us in the Foreword: "I did not make this story: it came to me that way, ready-made, defined by historical circumstances, generated by the soldiers who have had to fight the most insidious and intimate battle: the one with yourself. . . . In writing this book I am mainly a chronicler who was left no choice but to try to speak for the inarticulate, the psychically scarred, and the wasted . . . . It is a synthesis of personal experiences, observations, interviews, and journals here woven together into a narrative." The central figure is Specialist Andrew Collins, a medic who began deeply to identify with his wounded patients in Vietnam, worked with the ESR (Every Soldier's Responsibility, an anti-war movement), released to the Press documents about torture and murder of prisoners, and wrote a series of letters addressed to himself by the voices of American dead and wounded. The novel begins with Collins deeply withdrawn, muttering indecipherable phrases ("Sergeant back again"), and traces his return to a perilous sanity--a matter of choice the book suggests--so that he can return like Ishmael to tell the tale, just as Coleman is doing in speaking for the traumatized. Collins is very intelligent; and Coleman brilliantly shows how madness does not cancel out intelligence, how the insane can be aware of their insanity, can retain a clear, even comic vision of the insanity around them. This is a very tough book, avoiding any trace of sentimentality or of reverse sentimentality. Its persistent comedy is justified in that the patient/prisoners themselves produce it and are aware if it. Coleman's scenes are never static presentations; he is a master of narrative rhythms, of allowing each scene to develop and move unpredictably. Sergeant Back Again is a comic novel about evil without a villain, and avoids any easy irony (such as that the insane are really sane, that the officially sane among us are in fact insane, anything like that). I have not read all the books that have come out of the Vietnam War, but I can't imagine there will be one finer or more moving. GK

BY PHILIP D. BEIDLER in AMERICAN LITERATURE and the EXPERIENCE OF VIETNAM

Charles Coleman's Sergeant Back Again, a challenging, intelligent, painful book, is about the war-haunted inmates of a psycho ward in a Stateside army medical center, and about their attempts, some successful and some monstrously failed, to put off the madness of the war that has in one way or another seized them to the farthest depths of being.

With regard to Sergeant Back Again, more than one writer commented on the sense of profound experiential authority that pervaded the narrative, seemed in fact its most compelling feature. Evident throughout was the author's deep commitment to telling a story that was clearly his own and that of the men he himself had come to know and care for most deeply ten years earlier.

"The point of this is that we, gentlemen, we have to make some sense of this. We have to make some sense of ourselves." So, in Sergeant Back Again, speaks Pollard, the mad, broken, scholar-intelligence specialist, who now attempts to engineer a pact among his fellow psychic victims to get to "the truth of what happened, and why it happened," at whatever the cost, even if in the process the chance of thereby coming back instead eclipses itself into the final certainty of no return.

But there is also the young surgical specialist named Collins, the one soldier who does come through by going all the way back, abandoning himself to flight and darkness, casting himself down in the muck of a Texas riverbed and spending a last solitary terrible night in frenzied reenactment of what he has undergone, forming in clay effigy a "yearbook," his young psychiatrist Captain Nieland tells him, a "catalogue," a "sum total" of all the dead Americans he tried so desperately to keep alive. Collins returns from this to realize that "the possibility of making some sense of the non sense was not the futile plea of a madman."

In the foreword to Sergeant Back Again, the author is at pains to describe himself as "mainly a chronicler who was left no choice to speak for the inarticulate, the psychically scarred, and the wasted." It is not his book, he avers, even after the long transit from experience to ordered aesthetic expression, but still the war's. "I did not make this story," he writes; "it came that way, ready-made and defined by historical circumstances, generated by the soldiers who have had to fight the most insidious and intimate battle: the one with yourself."

BY GLORIA EMERSON, Author of WINNERS AND LOSERS

The madness of Andrew Collins--a hospitalized Vietnam medic--and the courage of a young [Army] psychiatrist give a startling, phosphorescent light to this novel, in which we are all to be found. It is terrfying, unspeakably sad, yet wonderfully funny on some pages . . . when Collins is at last set free it suddenly seems, dear God, as if all of the men so deeply hurt by that war might also find their own release.

BY TED SOLOTAROFF, Author of A FEW GOOD VOICES IN MY HEAD

Charles Coleman's "Sergeant Back Again," written with exceptional immediacy and depth, will inevitably be compared to Philip Caputo's "A Rumor of War" and Michael Herr's "Dispatches" as part of the permanent literature of Vietnam. One can also think of it as the "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" of Vietnam. But all such comparisons go only so far. "Sergeant Back Again" is a unique book, one that must and will be read on its own deep and complex terms.

5.0 out of 5 stars REVIEWS OF THE ORIGINAL SERGEANT BACK AGAIN, July 12, 2010

By 

George Kearns - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Sergeant Back Again: 30th Anniversary Edition (Paperback)

REVIEW BY GEORGE KEARNS, HUDSON REVIEW

The strongest, best-written novel by a new writer I have seen for a very long time is Charles Coleman's "Sergeant Back Again." Coleman, who served as a medic in Vietnam and later in the mental wards at Chambers Pavilion, Fort Sam Houston, the scene of his book, tells us in the Foreword: "I did not make this story: it came to me that way, ready-made, defined by historical circumstances, generated by the soldiers who have had to fight the most insidious and intimate battle: the one with yourself. . . . In writing this book I am mainly a chronicler who was left no choice but to try to speak for the inarticulate, the psychically scarred, and the wasted . . . . It is a synthesis of personal experiences, observations, interviews, and journals here woven together into a narrative." The central figure is Specialist Andrew Collins, a medic who began deeply to identify with his wounded patients in Vietnam, worked with the ESR (Every Soldier's Responsibility, an anti-war movement), released to the Press documents about torture and murder of prisoners, and wrote a series of letters addressed to himself by the voices of American dead and wounded. The novel begins with Collins deeply withdrawn, muttering indecipherable phrases ("Sergeant back again"), and traces his return to a perilous sanity--a matter of choice the book suggests--so that he can return like Ishmael to tell the tale, just as Coleman is doing in speaking for the traumatized. Collins is very intelligent; and Coleman brilliantly shows how madness does not cancel out intelligence, how the insane can be aware of their insanity, can retain a clear, even comic vision of the insanity around them. This is a very tough book, avoiding any trace of sentimentality or of reverse sentimentality. Its persistent comedy is justified in that the patient/prisoners themselves produce it and are aware if it. Coleman's scenes are never static presentations; he is a master of narrative rhythms, of allowing each scene to develop and move unpredictably. Sergeant Back Again is a comic novel about evil without a villain, and avoids any easy irony (such as that the insane are really sane, that the officially sane among us are in fact insane, anything like that). I have not read all the books that have come out of the Vietnam War, but I can't imagine there will be one finer or more moving. GK

BY PHILIP D. BEIDLER in AMERICAN LITERATURE and the EXPERIENCE OF VIETNAM

Charles Coleman's Sergeant Back Again, a challenging, intelligent, painful book, is about the war-haunted inmates of a psycho ward in a Stateside army medical center, and about their attempts, some successful and some monstrously failed, to put off the madness of the war that has in one way or another seized them to the farthest depths of being.

With regard to Sergeant Back Again, more than one writer commented on the sense of profound experiential authority that pervaded the narrative, seemed in fact its most compelling feature. Evident throughout was the author's deep commitment to telling a story that was clearly his own and that of the men he himself had come to know and care for most deeply ten years earlier.

"The point of this is that we, gentlemen, we have to make some sense of this. We have to make some sense of ourselves." So, in Sergeant Back Again, speaks Pollard, the mad, broken, scholar-intelligence specialist, who now attempts to engineer a pact among his fellow psychic victims to get to "the truth of what happened, and why it happened," at whatever the cost, even if in the process the chance of thereby coming back instead eclipses itself into the final certainty of no return.

But there is also the young surgical specialist named Collins, the one soldier who does come through by going all the way back, abandoning himself to flight and darkness, casting himself down in the muck of a Texas riverbed and spending a last solitary terrible night in frenzied reenactment of what he has undergone, forming in clay effigy a "yearbook," his young psychiatrist Captain Nieland tells him, a "catalogue," a "sum total" of all the dead Americans he tried so desperately to keep alive. Collins returns from this to realize that "the possibility of making some sense of the non sense was not the futile plea of a madman."

In the foreword to Sergeant Back Again, the author is at pains to describe himself as "mainly a chronicler who was left no choice to speak for the inarticulate, the psychically scarred, and the wasted." It is not his book, he avers, even after the long transit from experience to ordered aesthetic expression, but still the war's. "I did not make this story," he writes; "it came that way, ready-made and defined by historical circumstances, generated by the soldiers who have had to fight the most insidious and intimate battle: the one with yourself."

BY GLORIA EMERSON, Author of WINNERS AND LOSERS

The madness of Andrew Collins--a hospitalized Vietnam medic--and the courage of a young [Army] psychiatrist give a startling, phosphorescent light to this novel, in which we are all to be found. It is terrfying, unspeakably sad, yet wonderfully funny on some pages . . . when Collins is at last set free it suddenly seems, dear God, as if all of the men so deeply hurt by that war might also find their own release.

BY TED SOLOTAROFF, Author of A FEW GOOD VOICES IN MY HEAD

Charles Coleman's "Sergeant Back Again," written with exceptional immediacy and depth, will inevitably be compared to Philip Caputo's "A Rumor of War" and Michael Herr's "Dispatches" as part of the permanent literature of Vietnam. One can also think of it as the "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" of Vietnam. But all such comparisons go only so far. "Sergeant Back Again" is a unique book, one that must and will be read on its own deep and complex terms.