Jeremy Redmon

“In this haunting, beautifully written memoir, Jeremy Redmon captures the lasting trauma the Vietnam War inflicted on his father and on Vietnamese civilians devastated by the December 1972 carpet bombings. Flying a B-52 in Nixon’s fleet of 129 bombers, his father survived the deadly barrage of North Vietnamese SAMs over Hanoi. But survival carries its own burden. Decades later, Redmon finds himself circling the central mystery of his father’s life—whether this near-death encounter, and others like it, and guilt over the suffering he helped inflict, played a part in the tragedy that still echoes through his family. As he searches for answers, Redmon confronts the fragile terrain of memory, grief, and inherited pain, crafting a story that is both an intimate reckoning and a meditation on the wounds war leaves behind - for Americans and Vietnamese alike.” —Mai Elliott, author of The Sacred Willow: Four Generations in the Life of a Vietnamese Family.

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“Jeremy Redmon’s often-harrowing memoir about living with his father’s suicide is an extremely moving document. We follow Jeremy as he grows into manhood and starts a family, becomes a journalist, covers the U.S. war in Iraq, and follows in his father's footsteps to Vietnam—all while keeping his father’s act before him, determined to figure out what it meant. The author writes with bravery, honesty, and grace, but the best word to describe this memoir is sincere; Jeremy Redmon means what he writes. And he handles his material with consummate skill; he is a natural writer, and his memoir is a smooth read that belies the urgent communication beneath. I came away changed.” —Mary V. Dearborn, author of Ernest Hemingway: A Biography and Carson McCullers: A Life 

 

“As a boy, a reporter, and now an author, Jeremy Redmon has braved violence and its ugly aftermath. On a search to render meaning from those inheritances, Redmon has written the rawest, truest, and most generous of stories.”—John T. Edge, author of The Potlikker Papers: A Food History of the Modern South and House of Smoke: A Southerner Goes Searching for Home 

    

“How can a son make sense of his father’s suicide? In this brave book, Jeremy Redmon does his own tours of duty through war zones, Air Force records and cheap hotel rooms seeking clues about his father’s life while risking his own. He emerges with a deeper sense of parenthood and duty, grief and recovery. His journey, and his telling of it, are profoundly moving.” —Lolis Eric Elie, author of Smokestack Lightning: Adventures in the Heart of Barbecue Country and coproducer and writer for Faubourg Tremé: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans 

  

“I could speak at great length about the honesty and deep feeling of Jeremy Redmon’s Tell the Kids I Love Them. But I would rather just tell you to open it and read, for all that makes it such a beautiful book—its love, pain, grief, and hope— is baked into every sentence, from first to last.”—Tom Junod, contributor to A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood: Neighborly Words of Wisdom from Mister Rogers and author of In The Days of My Youth I Was Told What It Means to Be a Man: A Memoir