North Texas Author's Book on Vietnam Sweeps to #1 on Amazon

    DALLAS, TX, September 20, 2016 /24-7PressRelease/ -- Two days ago, social media lit up the cash register at Amazon. A new release, ETERNALLY AT WAR soared to the number one ranking in Vietnam War History. The book was written by North Texas award winning author Jeanette Vaughan and a post-humous contributor, Captain Robert "Gene" Lathrop, USMC. Lathrop was a Vietnam pilot during the TET offensive of 1968. He flew over 275 missions in the MacDonald Douglas A-4 Skyhawk. His squadron, VMA-311 flew over 54,625 sorties dropping over nine million tons of bombs. According to U.S. military historians, that record will never be broken.

For Lathrop, like so many veterans, the bomb damage assessment was internal. Ten years after returning, the nightmares and anxiety of PTSD reared their ugly head. Visions of napalm, things burning, and the sounds of ordnance exploding threatened to shake his sanity. Initially, Lathrop sought in-patient therapy at a new program with the Veterans Administration at American Lakes in Washington State.

But ultimately, Lathrop found comfort in dealing with the aftermath of Vietnam through the written word. He produced powerful poems and a memoir off which ETERNALLY AT WAR was based. He also gave two oral history interviews to the Vietnam Center and Archive at Texas Tech University. Graduate students recorded his tragic and haunting memories. The Texas Tech Vietnam Center houses one of the largest collections of photography, film, writings, and oral histories in the country. Much of this material has now been converted to digital format for downloading.

According to Dr. Richard Verrone, the previous Director of the Oral History project, "Our work was a way to honor those people we interviewed. It was incredibly rewarding to me to be able to help veterans with their PTSD issues as we did the interviews, if that was a possibility. I certainly made the effort to broach the subject if they were willing, and I wanted to get it out there, to remove any layers that were there, to help those who would research in the interviews better understand this terrible condition. As an instructor here at Texas Tech in the Department of History, I have had in my classes over the years many veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Their PTSD issues mirror almost exactly those in the Vietnam interviews."

Five star reviews have begun pouring in for ETERNALLY AT WAR, which captures the bravery of the attack missions flown by Lathrop in Vietnam and brutally, but honestly portrays the horrific effects that PTSD can have on those who survive war's aftermath and their loved ones.

"We owe it to the Vietnam generation, it's an amazing sacrifice that they made. But it's also the path ahead for the Iraq and Afghanistan generation. We have to do better than we did for Vietnam," according to Dr. Charles Marmar, Director of The Steven & Alexandra Cohen Veterans Center at NYU Langone Medical Center. As a trauma nurse, author Jeanette Vaughan believes that society has a responsibility to care for all veterans when they return to peacetime and aid them to recovery after their sacrifices.

Contact information: ETERNALLY AT WAR is available at www.ageviewpress.com or on Amazon. Author is available for interviews. Managing Editor of AgeView Press: Jeanette Vaughan. 972-658-7213

AgeView Press is small, cooperative, independent press operating out of Collin County, Texas. The organization was founded as AgeView, Inc. in 1991 as an educational media company. The press consists of five authors, several of whom are award winning in their fields. Genres of books produced by AgeView Press consist of historical fiction, women's fiction, Southern fiction, military fiction, military history, poetry, and young adult fiction. Many of the books by award winning author Jeanette Vaughan, USMC pilot Gene Lathrop and Navy pilot Bud Orr feature aviation themes and military history.

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