"In late fall of 1892 outlaw Eddie Mole gallops down the main street of Jericho Springs, Kansas, where he robs and shoots dead the freighter Barney Kreider. Some urge Barney's son Ulysses (“Euly”) to take revenge, but Euly is a Mennonite and Mennonites don't seek revenge. Instead, Euly plots how to make his fortune with the aid of his half-Osage sister, Kate, and his friend Johnny, an Osage farmhand. The three make a plan to sell goods and livestock to the settlers converging on Caldwell, Kansas, for the land run going on in the Cherokee Outlet. When Johnny tracks Eddie into the Cherokee Outlet, he witnesses Buffalo Soldiers evicting Eddie from a ranch, leaving it public domain, and Johnny and Kate make the run for that beautiful land. Euly follows close behind, even as Eddie, riding from Arkansas City, tries to reclaim his old ranch."
"These twelve stories reflect the combat infantry experience of the Vietnam War--in the gritty "Tanks," "Called of God," and "Incubation Period." There's also the woman's perspective of Arlene, a naive Red Cross volunteer or "Doughnut Dolly," in "A Man's World." Mort captures veterans' experiences in "Rest Stop," a woeful, divorced man's tale; "Hallelujah By and By," a dark, almost supernatural story set in the Arkansas Ozarks; and "Behind Enemy Lines," the story of a homeless, damaged man who at last finds his way home. All but two of these stories were previously published in such magazines as GQ and the MISSOURI REVIEW, or in the collection, TANKS. Mort served with the First Cavalry in 1969 and 1970, near Tay Ninh, as an RTO."
"John Mort's compelling first novel embodies both the Vietnam combat experience and the sad aftermath for those who underwent it. Alternating between "stateside" chapters after the war and the Vietnam chapters dramatizing it, the novel creates a tension back and forth in time as well as geography. We participate in the trauma of combat in crisp and authentic detail, and we witness the effect of that experience on "Irish" Donnelly, a bookish, reluctant soldier, and his fellow infantrymen in the jungles and mountains of Vietnam. Transcending any "political" focus, Soldier in Paradise dramatically renders the alienation of Vietnam veterans, ordinary men who've had an extra burden to bear because of the protracted, brutish character of an unpopular war that never came to a satisfactory end."
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