From the acclaimed and best-selling author of Hemingway’s Boat, the profoundly moving story of his father’s wartime service as a night fighter pilot, and the prices he and his fellow soldiers paid for their acts of selfless, patriotic sacrifice
In the fall of 1944, Joe Paul Hendrickson, the author’s father, kissed his twenty-one-year-old wife and two baby children goodbye. The twenty-five-year-old first lieutenant, pilot of a famed P-61 Black Widow, was leaving for the war. He and his night-fighter squadron were sent to Iwo Jima, where, for the last five-and-a-half months of World War II, he flew approximately 75 missions, largely in pitch-black conditions. His wife would wait out the war at the home of her small-town Ohio parents, one of the countless numbers of American family members shouldering the burden of being left behind.
Joe Paul, the son of a Depression-poor Kentucky sharecropper, was fresh out of high school in 1937 when he enlisted in mechanic school in the peacetime Army Air Corps. Eventually, he was able to qualify for flight school. After marriage, and with the war on, the young officer and his bride crisscrossed the country, airfield to airfield, base to base: Santa Ana, Yuma, Kissimmee, Bakersfield, Orlando, La Junta, Fresno. He volunteered for night fighters and the newly arrived and almost mythic Black Widow. A world away, the carnage continued. As he tracks his parents’ journey, together and separate, both stateside and overseas, Paul Hendrickson creates a vivid portrait of a hard-to-know father whose time in the war, he comes to understand, was something truly heroic, but never without its hidden and unhidden psychic costs.
Bringing to life an iconic moment of American history, and the tragedy of all wars, Fighting the Night is an intense and powerful story of violence and love, forgiveness and loss. And it is a tribute to those who got plunged into service, in the best years of their lives, and the sacrifices they and their loved ones made, then and after.
“Paul Hendrickson has long stood apart from other writers because of his singular, lyrical voice, and Fighting the Night is the work of a great author at his very best. The themes have universal appeal—fathers and sons, love and war—but the true heart of Fighting the Night is Hendrickson’s reckoning with the ghosts of a life in a book that is hypnotic, profound, achingly honest and compulsively readable." —David Finkel, author of Thank You for Your Service
“Fighting the Night is beautiful, searing, and poignant, an investigation of the human heart, of sky, and of father and son, prewar and postwar. I thought it might be another WWII book, and while there’s war, sure enough, it’s what happens in the hearts of men (and mothers on the home front) that distinguishes this book. Paul Hendrickson was walking toward the batter’s box through all his books, leading up to this moment. And when it came time to finally lay this one down, he swung with the fierceness of a Babe Ruth. It takes a certain kind of mountain climbing to write a book like this. Readers are going to be mighty grateful.” —Wil Haygood, author of Colorization
“There are countless books about World War II, the war in the Pacific, and the fight for Iwo Jima. Paul Hendrickson’s Fighting the Night is unique — a son telling the story of his father’s experiences as a combat pilot in the aftermath of the Iwo Jima campaign but written with extraordinary intimacy about how he got there, what he did there, and the impact it had on the rest of his life and on his family. It is a story of friendships forged, the emotional scars, and just coping after the war. Fighting the Night is more, though. It is the story of every war, every man in combat, and the scars each man—and his family—bears. It is a beautiful book, a stark and raw one in many ways, and a magnificent tribute to the author's father.” —Robert M. Gates, Secretary of Defense 2006–2011
