Publisher's Synopsis
This is a short novella about one man's war. It is said the first casualty of war is truth. Maybe so, but then the second is sanity. Ultimately the only casualty of war is humanity itself and sixteen years after the synchronised terror attacks on American soil, the world is still embroiled in an ever more complex conflict which neither analysts nor strategists seem capable of extricating us from. And far from the news headlines and the posturing of the political elite are the many untold stories of each and every individual life affected by this now global conflict . These small personal individual stories, each taken alone are not newsworthy, yet each and every one of them is the lived reality of war. As we watch the ever-metamorphosing conflict enter successive uglier and more bewildering forms, some of us recall another war, fifty years ago in a narrow stretch of jungle and rice in the heart of South East Asia, and wonder what - if anything - we have learned since then ... It is January 1968, the very eve of the notorious Tet offensive, when the Communist North brought the Vietnam war into the heartland of the Western backed South. One Australian Special Forces soldier, a member of the elite SAS, is desperately trying to return to his unit to provide vital intelligence that could alert America and its allies to the imminent threat. His patrol has been decimated by an ambush set by a supposed ally and the war has just got personal. And never far from his thoughts is the blonde female army intelligence officer who had laid an ambush of her own for him on the night before his deployment. As he races to return his vital Intel to an American forward operating base he knows, he struggles internally with the personal cost of killing, the dilemma of tangling with innocent local civilians caught up in it all, with the quaint but seemingly irrelevant traditions of the religions of both the occupier and the occupied and finally with death itself. This was Titus O'Connor's war.
