The short stories gathered in Angelo Presicci’s book, Fighting the Bad War present a vivid, first person account of realities that faced American soldiers in our war on North Vietnam and upon their return home.

Published by Robert Anbien’s Night Horn Books in early 2022, Fighting the Bad War  has been republished and relaunched by Iven Lourie’s Artemis Press, which took on the book after Anbien passed away late last year.

In November 1966, Angelo Presicci found himself manning an M50 machine gun atop an armored personnel carrier in the jungles of Vietnam’s Tay Ninh Province. He was a 22-year-old gay draftee from a small town in upstate New York. The linked stories in Fighting the Bad War are based on Presicci’s experiences in battle and on the long way home from America’s most unpopular war, the last entrusted to a citizen army. This was not their fathers’ good war. These stories tell a tale of shattered naïveté. “I believed in my country’s ideals when I was drafted, but, also, I was young and welcomed the adventure.” says Presicci. “I have tried to convey the awe of war and the shame of it.”