Swampscott author pens book on Vietnam War homecoming

SWAMPSCOTT – Swampscott novelist Deahn Berrini vividly recalls the fateful business dinner she attended in the early 1990s as a guest with her husband, Russell LeBlang, an attorney and foreign investments specialist.”I really wasn’t looking forward to going, but I went and that’s where I got the idea for the book,” said Berrini, whose novel, Milkweed, was recently published by Boston-based Somerset Hall Press.A woman seated next to her at the dinner was a widow, her husband a combat pilot during the Vietnam War. “The woman’s husband was still missing in action after all that time. His body was never found,” said Berrini, who claims that conversation provided the nugget from which the larger literary work emerged. After all, despite the passage of time, the widow was still waiting for resolution.A self-described Air Force brat, Berrini’s family moved around during her early years, but by the time she was six, they were settled in Ipswich, a quaint New England town where many scenes from the book are set. Both she and her husband graduated from Brown University and then law school, she at Boston College, he at Harvard.They moved to Nahant as newlyweds. LeBlang, whose law firm is in Boston, served the community as a Nahant call firefighter. A few years later they bought a home on Gale Road in Swampscott, where they are raising a son, Alexander, 17, and a daughter, Charlotte, 14.For the past four years, Berrini has been working on the novel from her home office as well as teaching creative writing classes at North Shore Community College and at the Senior Center in the Swampscott High School.”I wrote a couple of other novels, but they weren’t so good,” she modestly acknowledged. “But I’ve been told this one is much better and so far I’ve had a great response.”The book takes a look at how returning war veterans often have difficulty readjusting, as do those around them. The subject is particularly poignant these days as soldiers return from the battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan.”I wasn’t going to attempt to write a book about the combat because I obviously wasn’t there, but I knew I could write about what it was like when these soldiers came home,” said Berrini. “The book is actually a metaphor for change, which is why it’s called Milkweed. The monarch butterfly depends on that particular plant for survival. Some people depend on certain things as well – another person, a place, a job – and, when it’s taken away, they struggle.”Richard Currey, author of Fatal Light and Crossing Over: The Vietnam Stories, said this of Berrini’s book: “Milkweed reminds us that war stories are still the oldest, hardest, and most telling and compelling tales we share.”Donna Moreau, author of Homefront to the Vietnam War, said, “Milkweed is one of the rare stories about the Vietnam War that tell the tale of the women who wait for their young men to return from the battlefield.”Berrini’s friends tossed her a launch party last Saturday. The author also gave a reading and signing at The Swampscott Senior Center and at the Cornerstone Books in Salem. She has scheduled similar appearances at Borders Express Books in Vinnin Square on June 13 from noon to 2 p.m.; and at the Spirit of ’76 Bookstore in Marblehead on July 15 from 6-8 p.m. For more information, go online to www.deahnberrini.com.