I first met the fiction writer Scott Ely at Winthrop University in Rock Hill, South Carolina, where he and his wife, poet Susan Ludvigson, both teach creative writing. The couple divide their time between a two-story Victorian house in Rock Hill and a restored 12th century house that was once in ruins in southwest France. Ely is the author of five novels and three short story collections.

Ely (pronounced ee-lee) is an avid tennis player and hunter. On the day I interviewed him, he was preparing to go dove hunting with his Portuguese water dog. Ely’s most recent work is an essay for a collection about hunting dogs by writers who hunt.

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Born in Atlanta and raised in Mississippi from the age of eight, Ely is a writer rooted in the southern tradition, but he brings an international perspective to the new south. Soon after graduating from the University of Mississippi in 1968, Ely was drafted to serve in Vietnam. His war experiences inform much of his work. His first novel, Starlight, is the story of two U.S. soldiers in Vietnam and a pact they make for survival. One of the characters in his short story collection Pulpwood travels to France to learn about his father’s death in battle. Another’s father has committed suicide after spending the war in Africa and Italy. Sometimes the war or death harkens further back in time. In his novel Eating Mississippi four men take a river journey, following the trail of an escaped slave who fled to Haiti as described in a newly discovered diary. The violence in the slave’s escape becomes woven into the journey.

“War is the major experience of my life,” he said. “It works its way into just about everything in my life.”

For the first six months of his tour of duty in Vietnam, Ely said he and his fellow soldiers set up an ambush every night and waited to “see what would wander through.” When some other soldiers learned he had been an English major, they requested that he join them in their assignment, which was plotting mortar rounds. They needed another Scrabble player and figured he would be good at the game.

“This was much safer duty. We were in charge of harassment and interdiction fire. We’d plot the targets and then play Scrabble every night while the guns fired rounds off in random directions.”

Although his fire control job was not particularly dangerous in itself, Ely said he still worried about getting killed.

“I was more afraid of the people I went out with than the enemy,” he said. “The army was falling apart. You couldn’t depend on too many people. Everything was coming unglued. That was more frightening than anything else.”

Because most of the soldiers were conscripts, they tended to be careless and poorly trained.

“I saw one guy put his hand over the barrel of his M-16 and take a round through his hand. He could just as easily have shot me. I was glad to come home.”

Ely’s most recent novel returns to the experience of Vietnam. But The Dream of the Red Road offers an unusual premise: a U.S. soldier who surrenders to the Vietnamese because continuing to fight becomes untenable. In the case of Pender Hartwell, a native Mississippian, he was treated quite well by the Viet Cong. But at the close of the war, Pender is sent back home where he is a pariah.

“There were always stories going around about Americans deserting to fight for the enemy,” Ely explained. “Treatment of prisoners depended on what kind of mood either side was in.”

When he returns back to his decaying family home, Pender tries to rekindle an old flame, but he is trapped by an idea of idealized love, nourished by his reading of a Vietnamese poem, the Tale of Kieu.

“He gets pushed into this view of love that’s not real. He cuts himself off from home and then resorts to this idealized love,” Ely said.

When Pender is shunned by his countrymen, he opens his home to two refugees – Montagnards from Vietnam. The Montagnards are the indigenous peoples of the Central Highlands of Vietnam. Ely said he did have contact with the Montagnards while in Vietnam, but that the Montagnards were wary.

“I’d be wary too. A bunch of kids comes strolling through your village armed to the teeth. And you know that if the mood strikes them they could kill you. By the time I got to Vietnam the army was falling apart. It was open season on anyone who didn’t look like an American,” he said.

Eventually in the story, it becomes apparent that Pender is ruined for his homeland. He cannot find love and he will never be accepted by his people – a fitting metaphor for the experience many veterans face then and now.

Though his experiences since the war have been far different from that of his protagonist, Ely has not been untouched. In 2007, he learned that he had cancer from exposure to Agent Orange. Fortunately, his chemo treatments were effective and he has returned to a normal life, continuing to write and teach.

“The semester I did chemo I had plenty of time to work. But then often I didn’t feel like working. I did write a short novel during that semester. Short because I wanted to make sure that I’d be around to finish it.”

Pat MacEnulty is an award-winning fiction writer who teaches Creative Writing in North Carolina.