On March 16, 2001, Tracy Droz Tragos was surfing the Internet, entering family names to see if anyone had become famous yet. What she discovered instead was a first-hand account of her father’s death on a U.S. Naval swift boat in the Mekong Delta. At that moment, Tragos decided she needed to know who that twenty-five year old stranger was – not as a statistic, tangled in the memory of a war that wounded a nation, but simply, deeply as a man who laughed a lot and had blemishes and fears and wanted more than anything to come home and be her father.

BE GOOD, SMILE PRETTY is Tragos’ powerfully moving, personal exploration of her grief for the father she never knew, a grief shared by the estimated 20,000 Americans whose fathers were killed in Vietnam. Weaving emotionally compelling interviews with home movies, stock footage and family photos, Tragos travels from Selma, Alabama, to the U.S. Senate in search of her father’s Naval Academy roommates and war buddies, each of whom has been silently mourning his death and remember his life in their own way. What Tragos uncovers about the violent climax of battle is almost unbearable. But ultimately, it is the truth that allows her, and her entire family, to move forward.