Faith of Our Sons: A Father's Wartime Diary

In 1998, novelist Frank Schaeffer’s eighteen-year-old son, John, joined the marines straight out of prep school. Their ensuing journey, recounted in Keeping Faith: A Father-Son Story About Love and the United States Marine Corps, struck a fervent chord among the many Americans with a family member in the military, inspired personal communications from three American presidents, and propelled the book and the authors through many printings and onto Oprah, 20/20 and the New York Times extended bestseller’s list. In Faith of Our Sons, Frank Schaeffer picks up his family’s ongoing story as Corporal John Schaeffer is deployed to the Middle East on the day Gulf War II begins. Schaeffer’s powerfully moving and timely account of the universal experience of losing a child—either temporarily or permanently—to war and his attendant emotions (from pride to panic to rage and back again) is punctuated throughout by the voices of the many others in Frank’s situation, thousands of other parents and children, who continue to pour their hearts out to the Schaeffers in countless letters since the publication of Keeping Faith: from those waiting anxiously for loved ones to come home to those who know they never will.