Review: A Rock in the Clouds: A Life Revisited

A Rock in the Clouds: A Life Revisited by US Army (Ret.), Col. Joseph R Tedeschi
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

MWSA Review

Wars may last for years—or even decades—but they often end in an instant for the individual soldiers who fight them. A Rock in the Clouds tells the story of one such instant, a plane crash in Vietnam that ended the author’s deployment a mere three weeks after it began. It also ended the lives of thirteen fellow service members, and the author never takes his survival for granted as he revisits the entirety of his life before, during, and after that near-death experience.

Any account of a plane crash would be harrowing, but this book’s finest feature is that the author goes beyond a first-person account and provides a painstakingly compiled record that sheds light in a way no single person could. The research also includes interesting nuggets about medical personnel he met during his recovery and, most strikingly, a picture of the airplane’s pilot with three of the sons he left behind after perishing in the crash.

The accident and its aftermath comprise the middle third of the book, with the first portion listing biographical details and the final third largely reprinting correspondence that happened during the book’s creation. Yet the central third reflects an interesting balance of personal narrative and research, with moments that provide welcome texture, sometimes in unexpected ways.

Perhaps the most resonant aspect of A Rock in the Clouds isn’t a particular section but that the book exists at all—that even a survivor whose injuries largely healed, whose military career continued successfully, and whose subsequent life has been nurtured by family, faith, and community still thinks back to a foggy Vietnam hillside in 1966, peering out of a broken fuselage, wondering what had just happened and why his right leg was stubbornly refusing to move.

Review by John McGlothlin (May 2022)

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