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Metaphor for the Good Things
Altamara’s Gift follows a gifted southpaw who finds refuge in baseball as a child and whose adulthood is marred by the Vietnam War. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
I am a Vietnam veteran, and I never really cared for how vets were often depicted in films and on television. I wanted to write something that to me felt true and genuine. Most of the guys I served with were skinny 18- and 19-year-old kids thrown into a war they didn’t fully understand. Many were draftees just out of high school, and seemingly went from being the kid you sat next to in your English class, to young soldiers living like cavemen armed with automatic weapons. They missed their moms, girlfriends, and families. These valiant young men formed an unlikely and unshakeable brotherhood that allowed them to seemingly endure every hardship. However, they carried that war the rest of their lives. Combat is what I attempted to write about. There were long moments of boredom punctuated by seconds of sheer terror. They survived on letters from home, profane humor, their brotherhood, and, in Altamara’s case, memories of baseball.
I enlisted when I was 18 and served in the US Army from 1967-1971, spending most of my tours in combat units in the Central Highlands. Altamara’s Gift is the first part of a trilogy that follows many of the same cast of characters from age 18 and how they navigate life after they survive combat and try to return to normal lives.
Why did baseball feel like the right counterpoint to war — not just as subject matter, but as emotional language?
Baseball is simply a metaphor for the good things in life for Sergeant Lefty Altamara. Despite the fear, chaos, and death around him in Vietnam, Altamara always drifts back to baseball as his safe place.
Altamara is a paratrooper placed in charge of the recon platoon. However, his closest friendship is with the company medic Doc Hood, a former Duke Divinity student who failed to gain “conscientious objector status” and was drafted. They form an unlikely alliance trying to save the men of Delta-Double-Deuce.
Doc’s girlfriend, Kate, back home in North Carolina literally writes to him every day. She is the light and the hope of his life. However, Altamara gets very little mail from home except a weekly edition of the Sporting News (baseball), which he reads religiously. While the other men are resting and trying to stay out of the heat back at base camp after missions, Altamara has 5 worn baseballs that he fires repeatedly into sagging sandbags near their fortress. Baseball and the art of throwing them represent Lefty’s salvation.
I was an anchor, writer, and reporter for close to four decades, covering Major League Baseball for NBC, ESPN, and ABC. Baseball and what it represents to so many people all played an underlying theme in the novel.
Did you think of the book as partly about survivor’s guilt, or was redemption the deeper center?
The deeper center of the novel is about endurance. The core of the book is about the men and how they endure brutal conditions, the possibility of death, the loss of friends, and the hope and dream of returning home. The combat wears everyone down, but somehow, they still maintain a sense of humor. The expression they all use and say to each other is “WETSU.” An acronym that stands for “We Eat This Shit Up.” The men maintain a gallows sense of humor that they can take anything and everything that is thrown at them; you cannot grind them down.
If Altamara’s Gift leaves readers with one enduring image — whether a baseball, a battlefield, or something quieter — what image do you hope stays with them, and why?
My fondest wish is that the reader will come away with a greater understanding about the soldiers and nurses who served in Vietnam. Hopefully, the reader will cry a little, laugh a little, and gain a bit of understanding about the emotional baggage Vietnam veterans have carried around with them all their lives. The loss, the heartbreak, and the brotherhood. Perhaps Doc and Lefty represent the best of us.
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Altamara’s Gift
Altamara’s Gift follows Lefty Altamara, a damaged but gifted southpaw whose childhood refuge is baseball and whose adulthood is scorched by Vietnam. The novel moves between the diamond, the San Fernando Valley, the Battle of Hue, Delta Company Double-Deuce, and the lives of soldiers like Doc Hood and Tran Binh Trong, building a war story that is also about memory, loyalty, shame, tenderness, and the brutal search for redemption.
I was struck by how physical this book feels. Baseballs are not just baseballs; they have seams, age, smell, and a kind of private liturgy. War is not abstract either; it’s noise, rot, sweat, panic, gallows humor, and the terrible discipline of doing what must be done when the soul is trying to flee the body. The prose can be blunt and profane, but it also has surprising pockets of lyricism, especially when it turns toward gardens, rivers, music, or the clean geometry of a thrown ball.
I liked the novel’s refusal to make bravery simple. Lefty is heroic, but not polished; Hood is gentle, but not weak; even enemy soldiers are allowed fear, poetry, and longing. The book is capacious, sometimes sprawling, and that sprawl gives it the feeling of an oral history told by someone who cannot separate the jokes from the corpses or the love stories from the firefights. I found that messy abundance moving because trauma rarely arrives in neat chapters.
One other thing I liked was the book’s sense of texture. The way it lets ordinary objects carry emotional weight. A baseball glove, a scarred weapon, a garden, a Vespa, a letter from home, even the smell of gun oil or tomato plants can suddenly become charged with memory. That attention to tactile detail makes the story feel authentic, and it gives the violent scenes a stronger contrast because the world outside the war still feels vivid, specific, and worth saving.
This book is best suited for readers of Vietnam War historical fiction, military fiction, baseball fiction, literary war fiction, and stories about brotherhood, PTSD, and redemption. Fans of Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried may appreciate the way this novel blends battlefield horror with memory, absurdity, and aching human detail, while readers of W.P. Kinsella may recognize the almost sacramental treatment of baseball. Altamara’s Gift is a bruising, big-hearted novel about the men who come home from war carrying more than anyone can see.
Pages: 305 | ASIN : B0DYLJSZ8P
