Time to Go Home

My name is Peter Dewey. John Rowe and I met at the Viet Nam Memorial late one night in November 1982. John came to visit The Memorial before it was dedicated, before the politicians showed up, while it was still clean. We seemed to hit off, both of us Viet Nam vets and both of us natural-born story-tellers.

That’s how Time to Go Home, a fictionalize memoir by Thomas L. Trumble,. begins. At first glance, Time to Go Home is a collection of war stories, one after the other, many told by ghosts who had served and died, but whose souls have yet to return home.

But then Trumble takes the reader deeper into an exploration of its narrator, John Rowe. Amid the story telling, John begins to ask where God was in all of this. Why did the politicians let it happen? Why is death so haphazard; a mortar round out of the sunrise and the soldier on the motor bike becomes a hole in the ground?

Since the opening of Speak the Word Only, a play based on his book, Trumble has observed that many who have seen the play, and now read the book, have commented on how his story has prompted war veterans to talk more about their experiences. “I’ve have people who have seen the play come to me and tell me that their fathers or brothers have served in World War II, or Korea, or Vietnam, or even as recent as Iraq, but they have never talked about it.”

A story of duty, honor, and being comrades, Time to Go Home tells not only war stories. It is also a collection of going-to-war and coming-home-from-war stories, as well. “Because war is not an event,” author Thomas L. Trumble explains. “It is a continuum that begins at home and then ends at home. The soldier does return to join either the quick or the dead. But John never did come home, not really. He just sort of settled in. That’s the hardest story to tell, when you’re an old man standing in a graveyard far from home, just talking with ghosts.