There are plenty of critics who have raved about Thom’s Vietnam stories, exceptional feats of imagination from a man who, while a Marine himself, wasn’t actually there, having been prevented from deploying after suffering temporal-lobe epilepsy when he was soundly beaten in a boxing match. (Boxing, like that war, is a preoccupation throughout his fiction.) Each time his collections came out, the reviews were pyrotechnic: for Thom’s irresistible voice, his bravery, his audacity and grit, and his knack for unnerving cheer in the face of catastrophe. In short, for his “amazing blend of knowledge, skill, terror, and release,” according to Robert Stone, who seems to me to have been a fair judge of these things.

Thom’s sentences have crack and clarity. His paragraphs build to stories and places that you hadn’t thought to go, with people you hadn’t known you could recognize, and even love. “Give Baker a compass and a topographical map,” says the soldier narrator of “Pot Shack,” “and one could bear witness to—indeed, become a part of—the elusive, semimystical Tao of military science. Such were Baker’s leadership skills that his every thought, word, and action could propel a lesser personality into selfless, right actions in the service of the Big Green Machine.”

You will see all this, Thom Jones’s whole wide, deep, rambunctious, grief-stricken, and melancholy range of gifts, in the twenty-six stories gathered in these pages. Thom Jones is, as a character describes his man Schopenhauer, an “august seeker of truth.” He was a friend to the friendless, a strong voice for the maimed, funny as hell, and from the first to the last, a great American writer.

—Amy Bloom

Selected Stories

The Pugilist at Rest

HEY BABY GOT caught writing a letter to his girl when he was supposed to be taking notes on the specs of the M-14 rifle. We were sitting in a stifling hot Quonset hut during the first weeks of boot camp, August 1966, at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot in San Diego. Sergeant Wright snatched the letter out of Hey Baby’s hand, and later that night in the squad bay he read the letter to the Marine recruits of Platoon 263, his voice laden with sarcasm. “Hey, Baby!” he began, and then as he went into the body of the letter he worked himself into a state of outrage and disgust. It was a letter to Rosie Rottencrotch, he said at the end, and what really mattered, what was really at issue and what was of utter importance was not Rosie Rottencrotch and her steaming-hot panties but rather the muzzle velocity of the M-14 rifle.