No Glory

In the mid–twentieth century, the Vietnam War quickly became one of the most expensive conflicts in US history, resulting in more than 58,000 American casualties at a cost of more than $100 billion. Costs to those on the home front were high, too, and the experiences of military families are often ignored by history. Mothers effectively became single parents who were repeatedly forced to uproot their children, living in constant fear of losing both their husbands and their financial security.

Gail Hosking's No Glory remembers her mother, Gloria—a soldier's wife whose life was thrown off course by the wars her husband helped wage. Through narratives of miscarriages, adultery, abuse, and forgotten dreams, Hosking defies erasure by exposing the hidden toll of wartime on women during World War II, Vietnam, and the Cold War. This memoir is shamelessly vulnerable, written with beautiful prose that captures the slow collapse of a woman bound by loyalty to her loved ones. Like millions of military wives who struggled far behind the front lines to maintain their families in impossible circumstances, Gloria never got the glory she deserved.

Spanning the family's experiences on five army bases through three wars, No Glory serves as a site for witness and understanding—one family's behind-the-scenes testament to the devastating and multifaceted trickle-down effects of war on women and children.