Stand in the Fire

Three American Soldiers and Their Wars, 1900-1950
From the first shot fired by his grandfather on a jungle trail in 1903 to the day his father captured plans for the Chinese invasion of South Korea, William Crawford Woods’s family has fought in nearly every American war of the twentieth century. Drawing on letters, journals, official records, and other artifacts, Woods has revived their stories.
From the first shot fired by his grandfather on a jungle trail in 1903 to the day his father captured plans for the Chinese invasion of South Korea, William Crawford Woods’s family has fought in nearly every American war of the twentieth century. Drawing on his family’s letters, journals, official records, and other artifacts found in his grandmother’s attic, Woods has revived their stories—accounts of his grandfather, who served in the Philippine War and World War I; of his uncle, who rose from a West Point cadet to staff command in the 11th Airborne and died in action in the Battle of Manila in World War II; and of his own father, who transformed himself from a sedentary lawyer into a soldier and a spy. To lighten the dramatic and emotional load of his family’s service, Woods occasionally calls on memories of his own time in the army, which he calls “brief, bloodless, and largely comic.”

Woods fortifies this work of nonfiction with his skills as a novelist, crafting dramatic scenes and engaging dialog, offering far more than operational battlefield stories. He explores the wider impact of war, as we learn of his grandfather’s struggles with his wife’s patrician parents; his uncle’s involvement with Cy Caldwell, a superstar aviator of the 1930s; and his father’s swift ascent from civilian to counterspy.

Stand in the Fire is both an engrossing chronicle of a family who served in every American conflict from the Philippine War to the Cold War and a profoundly personal window into a family’s patriotic inheritance. This intimately documented history vividly conveys successive generations’ personal calls to serve, tells the stories of their paths to selfhood through military experience, and reflects on how they found fulfillment and adventure in their service, as well as evasion of the domestic scene.

Woods has skillfully created a memoir about the construction of memory forged in military service and American masculinity. Stand in the Fire is a powerful exploration of the love between fathers and sons and an attempt to honor family valor.

“I became aware of a debt to my ancestors I felt I could discharge by writing this book,” Woods writes. “It was a way of keeping faith with those ancestors.”

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