Teeing Off

In Teeing Off, innocence meets with adulthood in a coming-of-age story told against the backdrop of the Vietnam War. The heroine--bookish but immature--grapples with the recent death of her father, her mother's emotional withdrawal, the inevitable chaos of adolescence, and a growing awareness of how the war in Southeast Asia might impact those around her. For solace as much as protection from an adult world she only partly understands, she is drawn to the game of golf. The golf course offers an escape--a place to be alone with ball and clubs in the serenely ordered setting of eighteen numbered holes. Ironically, it is here on the course where she encounters a young man and family friend who unwittingly exposes her to a dark secret they are to share for years to come.

This guilty knowledge haunts the heroine's early adulthood and life choices. Driven by a relentless sense of responsibility for the war she would not have to fight, and the fate of her "family friend," she tries to make something good out of the Vietnam tragedy. Ultimately, she takes a job in Guam with Operation New Life, the leading Vietnamese refugee placement agency. Though she does not receive the closure she imagined, she achieves something better: perspective on the war and acceptance of its impact on her life and that of others. She also falls in love.

If the home front during the Vietnam years has been an underrepresented theme in fiction, Teeing Off exposes the many ways--poignant and tragic--in which Vietnam reverberated across time and generations for those who never fought but lived nonetheless with the war's legacy.