The Sons of Bardstown: 25 Years in an American Town.

• Author: Kovach, Bill

The American military involvement in Vietnam was insidious, beginning inconspicuously with a handful of military advisors in 1950. When it ended a quarter of a century later, Vietnam had reshaped our national life, exhausted our national confidence, and taught us finally to count the costs of power.

Our military hesitancy in Bosnia, despite recent cheap thrils in Grenada and Panama, is one of Vietnam's practical legacies. But only artists can tote the deeper costs to the American spirit. Like an untutored child confronting the algebraic unknown, solving Vietnam still tests the strengths and skills of writers and artists.

In The Sons of Bardstown, Jim Wilson joins the growing list of those who have tried to measure the full extent of those costs. Artistic ingenuity was required of the others who have also made the attempt. George Crumb, the West Virginia composer, reinterpreted the classical quartet form to produce "Black Angel." With a new collection of sounds he plumbs the depths of the war's disfigurement of the individual psyche in a work currently attracting a new generation to classical music. And Francis Ford Coppola had to reach back to Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness to find a vocabulary powerful enough for his needs when filming Apocalypse Now.

Wilson's effort is much different. His approach is the same direct, reportorial style he used when writing Retreat Hell! in 1987. That book, his first, described the struggle of American troops when they first confronted the Chinese army during the Korean War. In it, he dwelled on military costs and consequences. But for his second book he has chosen to tell a story of the toll of the war on a single community: Bardstown, Kentucky.

Bardstown has the setting for such a story. A town of less than 6,000, where lives are intertwined by connections of kinship, friendship, and geography. A town with a fierce independent streak, illustrated by its tradition of manufacturing moonshine whisky (today, licensed distilleries still produce Maker's Mark and Jim Beam bourbons). And a town imbued with a martial spirit, symbolized by the nearby armored calvary center at Fort Knox.

Bardstown has the history for such a story. Though never a community of more than a few thousand, it has sent more than its share of men to war. Fifty men from Bardstown joined the volunteers who followed Sam Houston and Davy Crockett from Tennessee to help Texas win its independence. One man returned. Bardstown's sons divided to...