The Turncoat

About the Book

Beginning with a nighttime apparition and ending with death in the jungles of Vietnam, Turncoat tells the story of Anthony Arnold, a young American Army officer who comes home from two years in Vietnam to find himself embroiled in mysterious reports of a ‘turncoat’ - an American soldier who has gone over to fight for the other side(referred to in continual rumors at the time as a ‘White Cong’).

Arnold wants to get on with a new life but is unsettled by the world he finds at home and intrigued by the insights he might discover in the identity of a ‘traitor’. What could move a man to such an action? And what might it reveal about his own past decisions?

Although uncertain as to even his own motivation, Arnold agrees to join a secret government search for this Turncoat, a decision that leads him into a maze of lies, betrayals, clinical hysteria, and deep into the lives of others, including: a young man who is ‘willing’ to be blind; a woman who moves him to examine his mission in a different way; and a soldier who chooses a death that places him forever among the missing. A journey that begins at home, it ultimately impels him back to Vietnam where it becomes not just a suspenseful hunt for a mysterious traitor but a Dantean search for the real meaning of duty, truth, and personal responsibility(the opening and closing chapters parallel the first and last cantos of The Inferno and the novel echoes Dante’s concept that the worst sinners in Hell are those who betray a trust).

A one-time graduate student in literature and poetry, Arnold sees the world through the filter of Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Emily Dickinson, and the voice of this story is unique from the moment we first meet Arnold on an open hillside in Vietnam:

“As the soldiers walked, their labored steps ticked slowly into wilting minutes and out on the bright, burning slope, each of them began to retreat within himself in an instinctive shrinking from the baking heat. Arnold’s brain continued to lighten from the unremitting glare, and his thoughts began to slowly whirl and drift like wearied dust devils attempting to flee the relentless sun, the anxious present, and his own nagging awareness. He continued to climb, and his overheated consciousness slipped like an eddy into the shaded memories of his University campus and Graduate School classrooms: clear Fall days with afternoon seminars on the cool luminescence of Metaphysical poets....the drawn curtains and interior thoughts of Nineteenth Century novelists....long, library evenings among the stacks and tiers of ‘coffined thoughts embalmed in spice of words’, the most substantial sound the incessant echo of the literary Canon.”

In fact, Arnold is that most unlikely and unfamiliar of modern ‘action heroes’ - a man of reflection and imagination. But while an intelligent character who is capable of romantic feelings and abstract thinking, he is also someone who knows that an individual must eventually take action in a very real world:

“Anthony blinked - the three figures growing smaller and dimmer as if they were some elusive truth slipping away from him – and then he made up his mind. Picking up his AR-15 and rising to his feet, he buckled his web gear and swung his pack onto his back. He looked quickly down at the faint yellow glow as if for reassurance, then turned and started out of the trees.

He stepped out into the clearing at a half crouch and began moving quickly but quietly through the grass toward the East in pursuit of the moving figures, keeping his own shape low and invisible against the dark outline of the trees behind him. He followed the figures as they moved along the track, drawing closer to them in the shadows, heading to the right – heading back toward the camp of the Turncoat. His blood raced now because he was moving fast, he was alone in the dark, and because he knew that tonight, by the first light of dawn, he would answer the final question for himself. Who was this Tu