A War at Sixteen: 1916-19 v. 2

The second volume of Green's autobiography (The Green Paradise, 1992), continuing his exacting and scrupulously frank "inner exploration" - as he recalls his often lonely adolescence in a time of war. In 1916, shy and preternaturally innocent 16-year-old Green - an American in Paris, where he'd been born (and still lives) - joined the American Field Service to fight for France. The war was to be one of the defining experiences of his long life, for while driving ambulances along the Argonne front, the sight of a dead soldier whose "hands were almost the hands of a little boy hardly able to hold a rifle" moved Green so much that he vowed never to kill. When he was found to be too young to be driving ambulances, he was sent home to Paris - but he soon enlisted in the American Red Cross and went off to drive ambulances in Italy. Near the end of the war, Green attended the French Army's artillery school and, after Armistice Day, accompanied the occupying French force to Germany. As the volume ends, he's en route to the University of Virginia, his first visit to his native land. These are the major chronological events of the book, but for Green they were only milestones in the more profound journey he was undertaking - the journey into self-discovery, sexual identity, and religious belief. Having recently converted to Catholicism, Green dreamed of becoming a monk, or at least a priest; sexually ignorant, he longed for intimacy but was uncertain how to attain it; and, deeply moral, he feared sin, though he read a risque novel - which he found defiling. In the course of the narrative, his clumsy attempts at heterosexual seduction fail, and, though still innocent, he begins to realize the truth of his sexual nature - a realization, he intimates, that will provoke "one of the most violent religious crises of his life." A compelling example of the examined life worth living, however painful the cost. (Kirkus Reviews)