Good for One Ride; updated edition [Kindle Edition]

“I’m forty-five years from The Tet Offensive in Vietnam, but I remember it as if the bodies in the streets of Hue were still warm. I’ve read hundreds of books about that war and written several more, but the one thing that most often eludes these stories, my own included, is the terrifying sense of anticipation that every soldier carries through every day and then brings home to live with for the rest of his life, should he be so lucky. To feel that every second in a war zone holds the origin of your oblivion and to realize once you leave that you are living on time borrowed from corpses is emotionally exhausting and almost impossible to put into words. And yet, Gary McGinnis has managed to do just that with grace and lyricism and great honesty. His book Good for One Ride is a small book in terms of pages, but it is a huge story. If you read it, you will understand the scourge of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder that curses combat veterans forever. This is an important work and only enhances the Vietnam War literature that has come before.”

– Jim McGarrah, author of A Temporary Sort of Peace, winner of the Eric Hoffer Award

This vivid short novel utterly transports the reader to the field of war: its infinite manifestations of fear and dreamlike connection and nightmarish loss. In each section the protagonist enters a more terrifying zone of psychological transformation. On every page, the skillful storytelling conveys the immediate effects and the permanent consequences of situations the narrator describes this way: “I strained to see enemy movements everywhere, to feel beyond my senses, to know without reason, to hear without hearing, to become united with the stench and to endure.” Gary McGinnis has written a wise, haunting story that is a remarkable gift to our nation at this moment when our citizens wish to honor and to truly make the effort to understand the soldiers returning to us and those who cannot return.

– Kevin McIlvoy, teacher and author of Little Peg