Critics once dismissed The Things They Carried as "too experimental" for war literature-only for it to become a defining work of the Vietnam era. My Father's Name Is War follows in this tradition, refusing to sanitize conflict or glorify sacrifice.

The Global War on Terror did not take place.

These violent hallucinations reveal what did.

Moral injury. Personal legacy. Protracted conflict.

The Global War on Terror Era fostered a wave of anxieties, behaviors, and distorted social norms that now define the U.S. public’s relationships with the military machine, its sustaining culture, and greater Western thought. My Father’s Name Is War: Collected Transmissions is one veteran’s endeavor to document and communicate the nature of these relationships, their impacts on the individual, and their implications for our future.

A futuristic weapons program employs nostalgia and shame to ensure micromanaged compliance on the battlefield. Virtual reality therapy sessions rekindle a longing for wartime in a lost combat veteran. A South Korean magnate’s passion project threatens to upend our ideas of global governance, one interaction at a time. Bauder’s debut short story collection invites readers to examine the complexities of war and its consequences, urging a review and a parting of ways with the gross excesses of the security state.

Collected Transmissions features nine works spanning multiple genres, including science fiction, psychological realism, philosophy, poetry, and horror.

Contents:

1.    My Father’s Name Is Forgotten
2.    And Hades Followed Him
3.    Chasing the Dragon
4.    Omertà
5.    Non-Combat Related Incident
6.    Waidmannsdank
7.    That It Was Good
8.    Private Passenger
9.    My Father’s Name Is War

Excerpt from the included short story Omertà:

“You’re spending your time with the wrong version of me. He needs to know what only you can tell him.”

“What? The truth? That you died for a mistake, a mistake that was written off so an officer could protect their career? You know what I’ll see in your son, right? The gift of the ghost, a man holding all my memories and none of yours. He doesn’t deserve my misplaced anticipation, my hesitant hopes, my association with his old man.”

“What do you mean by that? I wouldn’t have anyone else speak for me.”

“I live out of my car, Kenny, and I can barely manage that.”

Kenny turned to meet Randy’s gaze. “I don’t mean to sound like an asshole, but you’re all jacked up. It pains me to see it.”

“I finally had a chance to visit your grave after I got out. Section Sixty. Another funeral was going on that day, somewhere out among Arlington’s recent expansions. I heard the guns echo off the hill where the rose gardens mark two hundred years. I’ve rejected that salute every day since, rejected the salute of twenty guns while seeking the favor of one.”