Somewhat Difficult to Put Into Words

They carried the dead on their shoulders. They carry them still.

In Somewhat Difficult to Put into Words, award-winning author Anthony Hall Seed delivers a searing collection of short stories and short plays that plunge readers into the chaos, confusion, and quiet devastation of war. From a grainy film of an unknown soldier's final defiant smirk before execution to the brutal reality of the 1968 Tet Offensive, these pieces pull no punches. Young men, drafted before they are ready, are thrust into a fire they cannot comprehend and forced to endure horrors no training could prepare them for.

Each story is a fragment of something larger: the weight that never lifts, the smell of heat and death that never fades, the green body bags that melt into skin and memory alike. A Hackney Literary Award winner and Eugene O'Neill National Playwright Conference finalist, Seed writes with the authority of lived truth and the precision of a journalist who knows exactly where to aim. These are not distant portraits of valor. They are intimate, unflinching glimpses into what war takes and what it leaves behind.

In time, the survivors will walk along a long, black wall in their nation's capital, searching for understanding among names etched in granite. But some things remain lodged deeper than stone. Some things are, indeed, somewhat difficult to put into words. Will these young men ever set down the burden they were never meant to carry?