Hero mama

It's the 1960s and nine-year-old Karen Spears is living in a trailer in middle Georgia. Her father, David Spears, was killed in the la Drang Valley in Vietnam, and left behind three young children and a wife with a ninth-grade education. 'Hero Mama' is the story of what happened to this Southern family in the aftermath of a soldier's death. At first the widow Spears appeared to fall apart - turning herself into a beer-guzzling, good-time girl, while her children responded in kind. Eventually she recognized how much her children needed her and, with mule-headed tenacity, she earned her nursing degree and bought the family a real home fashioned from bricks, rising above her own flaws to forge a better life for her kids. Now Karen Spears Zacharias pays tribute to this woman of guts and determination - her Hero Mama - who battled overwhelming adversity to pull her family up and make them proud of her, and of themselves. 'Hero Mama' is also the story of the South, where a young girl grew up against an emotionally charged landscape of racism and bigotry, where the daughter of a fallen soldier had to face the stigma of a war nobody wanted, and where a family in crisis pulled together to achieve its own version of the American dream.