The Dead Drink First | Audiobook Reviews

The Dead Drink First: An Audible Original

Written and Narrated By: Dale Maharidge

Length: 3 hrs and 31 mins

The other, more searing, side of The Good War

I’ve had Bringing Mulligan Home by Dale Maharidge in my Kobo Library for, like, forever, but I’ve never gotten around to listening to it. It had such a compelling premise that I was driven to get it, but I always wondered why it got such poor Star-ratings.

Now, after listening to The Dead Drink First, where he outlines for those who are unfamiliar with that book, what it came down to, I’m glad I didn’t give it a go first before listening to this one. Cuz apparently, Maharidge did NOT bring Mulligan home, and it ended without any closure. Yes, that would’ve been entirely frustrating and might’ve turned me off this, the real closure.

I’m so very, very glad I had the opportunity to experience this book, and make no mistake: It’s an experience rather than a book. It’s recorded conversations between his brother and him, veterans who served with his father during the war of the Pacific and him, and between an assortment of others, along with his own narrative as the story progresses.

Growing up, Dale and his little brother alternately loved and hated their father, a veteran who came back from the war physically intact, but suffering not only from what would now be addressed as horrific PTSD, but also with a particularly bad case of TBI, traumatic brain injury. Their father was quiet, unless he was caught in a violent rage where people, his family, suffered.

And the little boys were forever haunted by one photograph of their father and another young man who later died on Okinawa. Their father is actually smiling. And that’s something they don’t see of him now. Dale wonders about the story of the dead young man, this Herman Walter Mulligan, and it turns into a life’s mission to find out what he can about him.

And along the way? He learns about what his father saw, did, went through—All the things his father would not say? Well, surviving men who fought alongside it will tell Dale, even if they won’t speak their own truths to their own families. Through the recorded conversations, we the listeners hear the pain of the men, the grief and fear that have NEVER left their lives for even a moment, and we hear the absolute relief in their voices as they have someone to speak these things to, someone who cares, who listens, who honors them with his questions.

Though this is a book about healing, it’s pretty gosh-darned devastating too. There was a man who lived a few blocks away from where I used to live. He’d watch for me as I walked home from the grocery store, would offer me and my heavy grocery bags a lift home, and he’d tell me oh the most nightmarish of stories that he’d never told anyone. I provided an able and ready ear, asked questions, gave him what I could: My sincere attention, my sincere respect. And I could offer him a sense of being forgiven, as he was one haunted man.

I thought of him as I listened to this book, thought of all The Greatest Generation, thought of every single documentary I’d even seen on war. This is a book that’ll get you to really think about a war that is somehow looming so far in the rearview mirror that it’s in danger of being lost and forgotten forever.

A short listen, The Dead Drink First is most certainly worth it. And now, I believe, I’m ready for Maharidge’s Bringing Mulligan Home.

I have the Closure.

Now I want the Battle…