<em>The Moral Life of Soldiers</em> comprises a novel and five stories. The title story, the novel, is told by an elderly officer retired from the People's Army of Viet Nam (North Vietnam), recalling his experience in the American army's Special Forces in Central America before he joined the PAVN. One one level, the story is about what causes a soldier to take up arms against his comrades. But it is also about the relations between men, and between men and women. And it is about the price one just sometimes pay for love. A novella-length story, "Paul's Father," is set in 1950's Georgia, in the period just before school integration in the south. It focuses on a white family relocated to Georgia from the north, and the moral compromises they must make to live peacefully among their white neighbors, and the compromises they resist making. The other four stories are set in California and have the teenage Paul Donaldson as their protagonist. These are coming-of-age stories in the more traditional sense, focusing on dysfunctional family life and the confusion caused by adolescent sexuality, jealousy, and rapid emotional change. All of the stories and the novel, "The Moral Life of Soldiers," are linked by having Paul Donaldson as either their protagonist or as a major character. These are linked coming-of-age stories set against a background of a country with change being forced on it, by the beginnings of the Civil Rights movement and by war. All of the stories are set between the end of the Korean War and the beginning of the Vietnam War.