No Glory

In the mid–twentieth century, the Vietnam War quickly became the United States's costliest conflict, with more than $120 billion spent and 58,000 soldiers lost. Costs to those on the home front were high, too—experiences often ignored by history. Mothers had to continuously uproot their children, single parent, and live in fear of permanently losing their husbands and, with them, their financial security.x000DGail Hosking's No Glory remembers her mother, Gloria—a soldier's wife whose life was thrown off course by the atrocities of war. Through narratives of miscarriages, adultery, abuse, and forgotten dreams, Hosking defies erasure by exposing the hidden toll of wartime on women during Vietnam, WWII, and the Cold War. This memoir is shamelessly vulnerable, written with beautiful prose that captures the slow collapse of a woman bound by loyalty to her loved ones. But here, readers will see the author's mother, with all her flaws, basking in the glory she never received. x000DA story spanning five army bases, three wars, and one family, No Glory serves as a site for witness and understanding—a testament to the multifaceted, trickle-down effects of war on women and children.

Gail Hosking is a poet and creative nonfiction writer from Fort Campbell, Kentucky. She is the author of Snake's Daughter: The Roads in and out of War, Adieu, Retrieval, and The Tug. Two of her published essays were named "most notable" in Best American Essays, and she has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes. She taught at Rochester Institute of Technology for 15 years and, in 2015, received the Distinguished Lecturer Award with her talk "Majoring in the Human Experience." Hosking holds an MFA from Bennington College.