Enemy

As a child, Ruth Clare didn’t know her father was a Vietnam veteran. She didn’t know people went to war and came back changed. What she knew, was that no matter how vigilant she was, or how desperately she tried to please, she always seemed to set off her father’s anger. With a mother too scared to intervene when anger became violence, Ruth learned to be protect herself, vowing not not be defeated by the circumstances she found herself in.

After becoming a parent, Ruth’s fear of repeating the damaging patterns of her past with her own children ignited a need to understand more about the generational impacts of war. Weaving her personal story with interviews with veterans and research into the nature and impact of military trauma, Ruth shines a much-needed light on the heartbreaking price children of veterans can pay when a parent returns home from war.

An invaluable contribution to modern war history, this deeply moving, award-winning memoir gives a powerful voice to the far-reaching impacts of war, and the unrecognised sacrifice of families of veterans.