A wife recalls her husband's journey home from Vietnam.

Lonely Girls with Burning Eyes has the emotional impact and resonance of powerful fiction, yet this memoir of one wife's experience of the Vietnam War is heartbreakingly true. Marian Faye Novak contrasts the innocence of the early sixties and the glamour of Marine Corps pageantry with the cold realities of the war and how it affected men, women, and relationships. "I watched my husband train for war. I waited thirteen months for him to return from it, and then I waited another fifteen years for him truly to come home."

In 1965 military life holds great allure for idealistic young students like Marian Faye Novak and her husband, Marine Lieutenant David Novak. Married only a week before their arrival at the training base in Quantico, Virginia, the new couple is thrown into the rigors of daily life in the military with little but their faith in the future - and each other - to carry them through their upcoming separation. A sheltered bride, Marian matures into a woman of courage and substance as she confronts newlywed poverty, her first teaching job, unexpected hinks in her husband's white armor, and finding an identity and friends in the forbidding military community.

After her husband ships out, Marian Novak embarks on the most difficult phase of her life: pregnant, living with in-laws in Tacoma, Washington, she must forge her own place in the world, enduring isolation and loneliness on the American home front while her husband fights in places like Hue and Khe Sanh, experiencing events she will never know or comprehend. Her strongest ties are to the other military wives she befriended, now scattered throughout the United States, but even that has its own sorrow: "The cost of comfort was the price of shared grief." When David Novak finally returns, he faces a nation of antiwar demonstrations and a wife and daughter he barely knows. It takes another fifteen years for him "truly to come home," a tumultuous emotional journey that Marian Novak details with both clarity and compassion.

Beautifully written, enormously compelling, this is most of all a love story, the bittersweet tale of a military marriage that survived where many failed, besieged by alcoholism, mental illness, and other legacies of war. Marian Faye Novak's memoir gives voice, finally, to the millions of women who endured the devastating effects of the Vietnam War on the home front, bereft of the men they loved and of the support of their families and their country.

Author: Marian Faye Novak
Hardcover: 276 pages