Books by Wendell Affield

Muddy Jungle Rivers, a river assault boat Cox'n's memory journey of his war in Vietnam and return home, gives the reader a close-up look at life in the Mobile Riverine Force during 1968, the bloodiest year of the Vietnam War.Images come alive as the story unfolds about a seven-man crew captained by a volatile, pro-war enlisted man. Told from a twenty-year-old sailor's point of view, this memoir takes the reader into frustration, rage, terror, death, betrayal, and search for redemption.This book won the Minnesota Veteran's Voices Award in 2017.

Pawns resurrects a decade of family dysfunction on an isolated farm in northern Minnesota. In Wendell Affields first book, Herman: 1940s Lonely Hearts Search, the author explored his stepfathers life on a farm in Nebish and search for a wife. This second book in the Chickenhouse Chronicles conjures up memories as Affield pores over musty letters, documents, and seventy-year-old photographic negatives beneath a magnifying glass.Those pictures transport him back in timein some cases before his own birth. Some photographs evoke fading memories of his mother, a beautiful young New Yorker and accomplished Juilliard-trained pianist; others evoke images of puppies tied to a corncrib, a harrowing escape to a secluded mountain lake in the Cascade Mountains, and his brother Randynow forty years dead.Dark images on transparent plastic film transport Affield back: jumping from a second floor window to escape his mothers wrath; pleading with his stepfather not to kill his puppy, shinnying up trees with Randy, almost drowning in Lake Chelan.Memory bits expand into images of fear and anger: a water trough Wendell angrily destroyed with an ax; long distant road trips with his siblings and mother in attempts to escape her abusive husband; hand-written notes on the backs of faded photos. His mothers fear of forgetting her children scattered across the country in foster homes after she was committed to a mental institution.