In 1966, 24-year-old Jerome Loving arrived in Vietnam as a commissioned officer, spending nearly nine months between Saigon and Cam Ranh Bay. Returning home to an indifferent and often hostile America, he put the war behind him to build a distinguished academic career as a scholar of Walt Whitman and Mark Twain. Decades later, Loving revisits his service in his newly published book, After the Good War: A Vietnam Memoir.

Host Terry Shepherd sits down with Professor Emeritus Loving to discuss his deeply personal reckoning with the Vietnam War, the lasting trauma borne by returning veterans, and how his career studying American literature helped him process his own history. Loving explains why he considers his memoir a "lament" for the nearly 60,000 young men lost and the ongoing struggles of those who survived, including his own brother-in-law.

Episode Highlights:

• The Reality of a Combat Zone: Loving shares the constant tension of serving as a commissioned officer in Saigon, detailing how he slept with a .38 and a .25 caliber weapon under his pillow and stacked glasses by his hotel door as a makeshift alarm.
• The Distance Between Wars: Loving contrasts the Vietnam experience—and the poor reception veterans received back home—with the patriotic legacy of World War II, noting the high suicide rates and enduring struggles of surviving veterans.
• A "Civil War at Home": Loving draws striking parallels between the deep domestic divisions during the Vietnam War and his extensive scholarly research into the American Civil War era.
• A Scholar's Journey: Learn how a veteran who utilized the GI Bill transitioned into a highly respected academic, eventually taking his family to teach in Leningrad in 1978 and at the Sorbonne in Paris.
• Echoes of History: Loving reflects on the cyclical nature of geopolitical conflicts, comparing the escalating quagmire of Vietnam—where troop levels rapidly surged from 125,000 to over half a million—to subsequent wars and modern international tensions.

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