"If I had the guts, if I wasn't so ashamed, if I could find the right words, I'd like to tell you just what kind of year it's been for me. A walking, breathing, wide-awake nightmare and I can't seem to get rid of it. Can't seem to really come back from the Delta." So confesses Thomas Joseph Hollaran, once Private First Class and now private citizen and narrator of this fine first novel. Joseph Heller's Catch-22 gave us the classic portrait of a man trying to survive the idiocy of war. Tim Mahoney gives us an unforgettable portrait of a man desperately trying to survive the peace. Coming home was just the beginning of Hollaran's battles. While he was in Vietnam, his wife left him and has now taken up with another guy. His native ground - Newark, New Jersey - looks more and more "like some crazed B-52 pilot mistook it for Hanoi." He's seeing two shrinks - one can't remember his name, the other gives him pills and tells him to forget. His father the cop can't understand why his son's dream is to open a restaurant. Once Hollaran was Jersey Sheet & Tube's fair-haired boy, but now he's been demoted to the warehouse. And no one at work can understand why Hollaran isn't just slipping right back into civilian life. Many of them fought in the big one, the real one - World War II - why is he "whining about this little firecracker"? Only Eddie, his best childhood buddy and fellow vet, knows what he's going through. But Eddie is fast going off the deep end; he's hatching a plot to bomb "the bozo big-shots" who sat around their safe offices and sent guys like Eddie off to war to do their dirty work. As Hollaran inches his way out of this ungodly mess - by working for and then accepting the love of a good woman named Annie, by learning from Eddie's dangerous mistakes - Vietnam starts to become past rather than present. Hollaran's World War is the sometimes angry, often funny story of how one man learns to get even instead of taking revenge. - Dust jacket.