Rent At Hell's Gate: A Soldier's Journey from War to Peace

Synopsis

AT HELL'S GATE is the memoir of Claude Thomas, a helicopter gunman during the Vietnam War who later became a Buddhist monk. His killing of over a hundred people in the line of duty left his civilian life a tangle of unhealed emotional scars, alcoholism, homelessness, and suicidal despair. Thomas's life changed when he went on a retreat for vets given by Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh. Having found the path through his personal darkness, Thomas became a Buddhist monk himself. The book culminates in stories of pilgrimages Thomas made from Auschwitz to Vietnam, and across the United States. Deeply moving, and vividly relayed in spare, elegant prose, Thomas's life spans the depths and pinnacles of human experience, and makes for inspiring reading.

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