A Name on a Wall

Sep 21, 2024 7:19 PM

Author:Mark Byford

A Name on a Wall

An unusual coincidence occurred early one morning at the most visited war memorial in the United States as a shaft of sunlight hit one of the 58,282 names on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. The name was Larry Byford.

So begins a unique personal journey to discover the story of the name on the wall. Travelling more than 30,000 miles, from east Texas to Vietnam, Mark Byford learns about the lasting impact on Larry's siblings, friends and the comrades who were there with him on the day he died in the summer of 1967. He pinpoints why that time became the turning point of America’s most divisive war of the twentieth century.

A Name on a Wall is a gripping true story that focuses on duty, heroism and fate. We learn not only about the tragic loss of Larry Byford, a draftee rifleman in Vietnam, but also the contrasting war story of the author’s own father, Lawry Byford, a draftee from Yorkshire, for whom the Second World War became the springboard for a new life filled with opportunities.

Forty years after the final American combat troops left Vietnam, thirty years after The Wall was built to heal a nation, and in the light of the recent controversial wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, what lessons, if any, have been learnt through the ultimate sacrifice of the name on a wall?

Reviews

This tale should be compulsory reading for MPs and military leaders and anyone else who might lead us into armed conflict. It raises questions about the morality of war and duty to serve that need constant and rigorous attention. It is also an absorbing and meticulously researched work. I wish I had written anything half as good.

—— Julian Pettifer

A Name On A Wall – part biography, part chronicle, part history – movingly connects past and present and reconciles the differences that seemingly separate them.

—— The Telegraph and Argus

One of the finest and most moving books I have read in a long time. It is calm and understated, and yet written with great emotional intensity. I found it hard to think about anything else for days after reading it

—— John Simpson, BBC world affairs editor

We gaze at the names on war memorials and wonder, and now I know the reason why. This book is meticulous in its research, compelling in its structure. A marvellous book

—— Sir Michael Parkinson, broadcaster

An extraordinary experience like nothing ever done before in America that I know of. It’s important. It matters

—— Jan Scruggs, founder and president of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund

Quite simply a beautiful book. Mark Byford has a curious nature and a tender heart. I shall never look at a war memorial again without wondering who was the young man whose name is on a wall

—— Dame Jenni Murray, broadcaster and author

A remarkable story that skilfully knits together heroic family history and the broader sweep of the tragedy of the Vietnam war. So moving and thoughtful, there has been no history of that conflict remotely like this one

—— Andrew Marr, journalist and broadcaster

Superb ... One of the great mysteries of history is how Europe's great powers could have stumbled into World War I ... This is the single best book I have read on this important topic

—— Fareed Zakaria

A meticulously researched, superbly organized, and handsomely written account

—— Military History

Clark is a masterly historian ... His account vividly reconstructs key decision points while deftly sketching the context driving them ... A magisterial work

—— Wall Street Journal

This compelling examination of the causes of World War I deserves to become the new standard one-volume account of that contentious subject

—— Foreign Affairs

A brilliant contribution

—— Times Higher Education

Clark is fully alive to the challenges of the subject ... He provides vivid portraits of leading figures ... [He] also gives a rich sense of what contemporaries believed was at stake in the crises leading up to the war

—— Irish Times

In recent decades, many analysts had tended to put most blame for the disaster [of the First World War] on Germany. Clark strongly renews an older interpretation which sees the statesmen of many countries as blundering blindly together into war

—— Stephen Howe , Independent BOOKS OF THE YEAR

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