On the Way Home, by Robert Bausch, is free in the Kindle store. This edition is self-published (despite the claim for the publisher on it; I wish Amazon would screen the publisher claims by those using their KDP system to self-publish), but was originally published in Hardcover by St. Martin's Press (1982).Book Description
Imagine the elation of having your dead son brought back to life. That is what Michael Sumner's parents experience when, one year after he's reported killed in action in Vietnam, they are told their son is alive and has escaped from a cadre of Viet Cong. But reunited with his family in their new Florida home, Michael has become a stranger to them, and soon living with him becomes more difficult than having him dead. Attempting to break into his suffering and get him back, fearful he may turn to violence, his parents suspect the worst when a young woman who has befriended Michael abruptly disappears. This debut novel by award winning novelist Robert Bausch is, according to Maureen Ryan in "The Other Side of Grief" (University of Massachusetts Press, 2008), "perhaps the first to present the ruinous effects on his immediate family of the veteran's maladjustment," after the war. This novel deals with the emotional cost of post traumatic stress disorder in a time when that disorder had not yet been named. Michael Sumner has been held alone by a small band of Viet Cong, who torture him in ways that are psychologically devastating. He is lucky enough, and brave enough, to escape, but then he has to come home.
