Killing ... a visceral explosion by Vic Fortezza. My review

I knew Dante the first moment he hugged his son but was skittish about doing it, as men often are. His son, Junior is going off to the Gulf War, and the father is choking on the inside cause he knows about combat. He knows about Nam. We are not told about the killings there. You see, that begins the beauty of Vic Fortezza's novel, Killing, on amazon.com. Amid all the words, it is Dante's silence that holds us with a fist of menace. We know from the beginning, this man is wound too tight. He is coiled and G-d Forbid Junior does not come back home.
Yes, I know Dante. He was from the other side of the street where I grew up to be safe. I mean, being white was a blessing in our Brooklyn neighborhood. Being Black was always worse, walking our mean streets. Dante's son knows one of the crowd of ten to thirty that saw Yusef Hawkins killed. He was a Black kid in the wrong neighborhood. Dante's neighborhood.

We were lucky and expected and got only belts in the mouth, a whack in the gut, a kick in the ass. But they let us live if we obeyed the law of the streets, the territories staked out between the bowling alleys and the pizza joints.Killing is Saturday Night Fever on steroids.
By that I mean, it has left me undone. The novel brings back a divisive time and guilt I never thought I owned. You see, I was on the other side of the street, deferred, crazy; seeing spirits, hearing voices during the hearing test. "Hell no, we won't go." And they, not us, were crazy.
But you know, there were Dantes.Though he says stuff that is repugnant to me, he has a case. He is from the other side and hates our protest as much as we hated the war. It was a soldier's prerogative.
Tonight, I recalled a real soldier who came home from the war, as silent as Dante. He was my childhood friend. W.W. came to visit me during a protest rally in Brooklyn. He said nothing, and I said nothing to him. I did not know where or what he had done in Nam. He wasn't telling and I wasn't asking. It was the last time we spoke until tonight.
As Dante tears at my heartstrings,though, I softened my position and felt profound guilt I had not known I carried from that last conversation with my childhood friend. The difference gave him the right to wear Vietnam Veteran caps and does not allow us to wear Vietnam protestor caps. It gives those like him who served the right to have fifty thousand names on the Washington wall. Not one protestor, I believe, is so honored, except, perhaps in isolated places like Kent State. I wanted to put down this book when one of Dante's friends says he was glad about the massacre that tore the fabric of our youth away. But I read on. Though I still hate the words, like i say, they had their case. And now the soldiers finally have the field and the final word.
Still, it is so shocking to hear them mouth the words from the inside out, but Vic Fortezza makes soldiers and dads, sons and wives, breathe with eternal, even heroic life.

This is more than a good read. The dialogue is too real, shocking, to be a play. Look, I am not no mammaluke, no sfacheem. I don't know why this extraordinary novel has taken so long to see the light of day. But I am convinced it is so real in its dialogue that resonates such truths as to make Killing a visceral explosion.
Tonight I spoke to my childhood friend, W.W., whom I did not talk to for fifty years and I said, "I'm sorry," for not understanding his right to be silent. Vic Fortezza has given voice to an era of silence, cowardice and heroism. His amazing gifts bring us a common humanity; the shared affective suffering of our mixed-up generation. "