Faith of Our Sons: A Father's Wartime Diary

In 1998, novelist Frank Schaeffer's eighteen-year-old son John joined the Marines straight out of prep school. Their ensuing journey, recounted in the bestselling Keeping Faith: A Father-Son Story About Love and the United States Marine Corps, struck a fervent chord amongst the many Americans with a family member in the military. In Faith of Our Sons, Frank Schaeffer picks up his family's ongoing story as Corporal John Schaeffer is deployed to the Middle East on the day Gulf War II begins. Schaeffer's moving and timely account of the universal experience of losing a child— either temporarily or permanently—to war and his attendant emotions (from pride to panic to rage and back again) is punctuated throughout by the voices of the many others in Frank's situation, thousands of parents and children, who continue to pour their hearts out to the Schaeffers in countless letters since the publication of Keeping Faith—from those waiting anxiously for loved ones to come home to those who know they never will. No other book addresses the more intimate, but in some ways just as difficult and heroic side of the wartime experience: that of those waiting at home, praying for the safety of their loved ones.