Gunning for Ho

H. Lee Barnes, a native Westerner born in Idaho and reared in five Western states, resides in Southern Nevada where he teaches English and creative writing to college students. He has received many honors for his writing, including the Willamette Fiction Award and the Arizona Authors Association Fiction Award.

"It's as hard to find a hero as it is to pretend there's no truth,' the narrator of one of these fine tales muses, but even that isn't completely true. Like Tim O'Brien and Larry Heinemann, in Gunning for Ho, H. Lee Barnes takes the reader beyond the now-familiar surface of Vietnam stories and manages to find truth in the simple heroism of enduring." - Stewart O'Nan, editor of The Vietnam Reader  "H. Lee Barnes' Gunning for Ho is a commanding debut collection. These delicately crafted stories are powered by anger, sadness, bafflement and, eventually, a transcendent comprehension. Barnes writes with genuine compassion and unexpected humor as he excavates the innocence and complicity of so many of us who found ourselves at the unquiet site of the Vietnam War. His dramatic, beautiful book contributes to a gradual and complicated understanding among many of us who fought against and in that bloody war." - Valerie Miner, author of A Walking Fire "It's the Nineties perspective that make the stories in Gunning for Ho so full of resonance. Gone is bitter confession, guilt, art-as-therapy, or politics. In their place Barnes has given us vividly-imagined stories that draw upon one war to drive at the nature of all war." - John Mort, author of Soldier in Paradise