Publisher's Synopsis
The novel, an eyewitness account of the Vietnam War, is a somber warning of what lies in store for American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is a prophecy of the inevitable consequence of our massive bombing raids and artillery barrages that are at this moment blowing Iraqi towns and cities into oblivion in the name of justice and retribution. It makes it all too clear just how costly this conflict will be both for our troops as well as for tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis and Afghan civilians. It is a prediction of how this mindless slaughter will come home to haunt America. No matter how oppressed the Iraqi and Afghan may be, like the Vietnamese, they will fight doggedly against the foreign invader. They will not give up.
The protagonist, Vincent Grecco mirrors the author's own sojourn as an expatriate in Vietnam throughout the war. What does Grecco find so deplorable? What are the numerous obstacles he encounters? How does he strike out to set things straight? And finally, what alternatives are left for him to take? These are some of the conflicts that the plot builds upon. There are also numerous sub plots that interact with the main ones.
Vince Grecco, a maverick, is transferred from the Refugee Division's main office in Saigon to a remote output in the Mekong Delta as a Refugee Advisor. He lands in the very midst of the war staying at military advisory team conclaves and Special Forces' A-camps. He tours the Mekong Delta's vast network of canals and rivers on Navy PCF's and PBR's and traverses the delta's vast rice bowl by helicopter.
Grecco moves from one calamity to another clashing with lawless expats, self-serving bureaucrats and bigoted martinets. Never very enthusiastic about the war, Grecco grows more and more disenchanted. Corruption, prejudice, tyranny and genocide radicalize him. After a good deal of soul searching interspersed with spasms of rage, Grecco has an emotional breakdown. At the end of the novel he defects by parachute into the jungles to join up with the Viet Cong as a noncombatant.
The characters include a prison professor at Vietnam's Devil's Island who converts a Bin Xuyen river pirate to the Communist cause; a brutal massacre and an Arvin father and Viet Cong son who meet at the scene of the carnage and set aside their differences long enough to bury their family's bodies; a Francophile Vietnamese province chief who regards his American counterparts as droll simpletons; a high ranking foreign service officer who is a bureaucratic dimwit; a peasant youth who is recruited by the Viet Cong and ends up fighting and laboring in Cu Chi's vast tunnel complex; and an American youth, molested and brutalized as a child at a Catholic boys town, who finds solace in the heat of battle.
At a Friday night poker game, a drunken CIA chief and his Vietnamese counterpart reveal in graphic detail just what goes on at an interrogation center and how prisoners are eventually disposed of. (Shades of Abu Ghraib)
