Celebrated author Jason Brown (Why the Devil Chose New England for His Work) said it best when he described this riveting memoir: "A Surgeon's War offers an indispensible view of combat medicine in the Vietnam War. It is also the beautifully written story of a young man coming of age in the crucible of conflict. We follow the young Ward Trueblood from the protected, Eisenhower-era life of a small town in the Midwest, to heady and idealistic days as a graduate student at Stanford, to the war, and finally to his adulthood as a leading figure in trauma medicine. From his reflections on his father's experience as a combat surgeon in World War II, to his own assessments of the evolution of trauma care and of the American conscience, Ward's story is the story of America in the 20th Century."