Tom Williams

The Longest Road Home Tom Williams

The Longest Road Home is the third novel in the trilogy that chronicles the life of Michael Flanagan with the first being, West Into The Rising Sun. The conclusion of the second novel, Setting Of The Rising Sun, found Flanagan arriving home. He had been held prisoner by the Viet Minh following the defeat of the French at Dien Bien Phu in the spring of 1954. This defeat ended the First Indochina War, concluded France?s colonial presence in Asia, and planted the seeds for the American involvement in Vietnam a decade later. Flanagan spent the next decade after the defeat of the French building his cargo airline to be a dominate force in the air cargo business across the Pacific. His airline prospered from the escalating war in Vietnam as the priority needs for men and materials grew with the intensity of the conflict. As part of the American military buildup in Vietnam in the mid-nineteen-sixties, an Army pilot arrived in Vietnam as part of this massive military deployment. His name was Jack Rogers and his arrival in Vietnam was much like Flanagan?s arrival in France during World War I. They both stepped into a brutal conflict that they observed from the air, but didn?t understand. Though two generations and decades apart, their lives seemed to have followed similar paths. In The Longest Road Home, we follow the life of Jack Rogers and observe the parallelism that it has with Flanagan?s life. Sadly in many ways both their lives seem to prove that over a period of fifty years little was learned by earth?s inhabitants, not even that one war just begets another. Jack Rogers was drawn deeper and deeper into the conflict in Vietnam by his relationship with a Vietnamese woman. Similarly Flanagan had also been drawn into Asian conflicts beginning thirty years earlier by his relationships with the oriental women that had passed through his life. As if by fate or the draw of kindred spirits the lives of the two men would cross each other's. This seemed especially true when a helping hand was most needed.