Tell the Kids I Love Them

"As a boy, a reporter, and now an author, Jeremy Redmon has braved violence and its ugly aftermath. On a search to render meaning from those inheritances, Redmon has written the rawest, truest, and most generous of stories."—John T. Edge, writer and host of TrueSouth, author of House of Smoke: A Southerner Goes Searching for Home

"Redmon's often-harrowing memoir about living with his father's suicide is extremely moving. He writes with bravery, honesty, and grace, but the best word to describe this memoir is sincere. I came away changed."—Mary V. Dearborn, author of Hemingway: A Biography

"With clear, precise prose Redmon takes us to war-torn Iraq, Little League lacrosse fields, marriage, and fatherhood all in an attempt to discover something of his father's journey from celebrated Vietnam era–US airman to suicide in a cheap hotel room. What he learns contains lessons for us all."—Lolis Eric Elie, co-producer and writer for Faubourg Treme: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans

"I could speak at great length about the honesty and deep feeling of Jeremy Redmon's Tell the Kids I Love Them. But I would rather just tell you to open it and read, for all that makes it such a beautiful book—its love, pain, grief, and hope—is baked into every sentence, from first to last."—Tom Junod, author of In The Days of My Youth I Was Told What It Means to Be a Man

"In this haunting, beautifully written memoir, Jeremy Redmon captures the lasting trauma the Vietnam War inflicted on his father and on Vietnamese civilians devastated by the December 1972 carpet bombings. Flying a B-52 in Nixon's fleet of 129 bombers, his father survived the deadly barrage of North Vietnamese SAMs over Hanoi. But survival carries its own burden. Decades later, Redmon finds himself circling the central mystery of his father's life–whether this near-death encounter, and others like it, and guilt over the suffering he helped inflict, played a part in the tragedy that still echoes through his family. As he searches for answers, Redmon confronts the fragile terrain of memory, grief, and inherited pain, crafting a story that is both an intimate reckoning and a meditation on the wounds war leaves behind for Americans and Vietnamese alike."—Mai Elliott, author of The Sacred Willow: Four Generations in the Life of a Vietnamese Family