Inscribed by "collaborator" Jeanette Vaughan
"To Dean- I am most happy to have this beautiful and moving book of Vietnam Poetry added to the Dean Echenberg War Poetry Collection! Thank you for bringing light to Vietnam Veterans especially those with PTSD!" Jeanette Vaughan

Retired Marine Corps Capt. Robert G. Lathrop’s The Dark Side of Heaven (AgeView Press, 68 pp., $24.99), as the title suggests, is a dark book. Lathrop, a former A-4 Skyhawk pilot, arrived in Vietnam during the 1968 Tet Offensive. In fifteen months, he flew more than 275 missions. His squadron, VMA-311, flew 54,625 sorties and dropped some 9 million tons of bombs.

Lathrop was tortured by his role in the Vietnam War and he wrote some moving and powerful poems about what he viewed as war atrocities. “He wrote them to honor the men and women who served,” the book’s collaboration Jeanette Vaughan writes.

After the war, Lathrop endured PTSD and sought treatment at the VA’s American Lake Hospital near Tacoma, Washington, where many of my close friends also have been treated. Lathrop spent much of his retirement “in periods of solitude,” writing down his memories of his experiences in Vietnam, seeking “answers and meaning to the controversial questions, occurrences and mysteries that took place during the Vietnam Conflict.”

From a review by David Willson. In the VVA Online Veteran. Jan 19, 2016