Leonard B. Scott (Col. USA ret.) is the author of the acclaimed novels Charlie Mike, The Last Run, The Hill, The Expendables, The Iron Men, and Forged in Honor. Scott retired in 1994 as a full colonel after a 27-year career in the United States Army, with assignments throughout the world. A veteran of Vietnam, he earned the Silver Star and Purple Heart.
This taut tale of two stepbrothers stretches from the ``baking dust'' of rural Oklahoma to the steamy heat of Vietnamese jungles. After a sadistic coach costs him his football scholarship, tall, blond Jason Johnson winds up a lieutenant in a Ranger paratroop division in Vietnam. Meanwhile, stepbrother Ty Nance's half-Kiowa Indian ancestry brings its own problems, and Ty, too, becomes a paratrooperlike his father and uncle, both of whom died in combat. Scott ( Charlie Mike ) elicits sympathy for the two heroes while shocking with grim, realistic battle scenes, and introduces two characters who are North Vietnamese, a general and a private. The paths of the four men concenter on Hill 875, in ``the single most costly battle'' of the Vietnam War. The portrayal of the North Vietnamese offers unsettling insights into the nature of an all-too-human enemy, and underscores the pointlessness of the war as ``an aberration of logic.'' The anti-war message here is no less forceful for emanating from an action-adventure novel at that genre's best. (Mar.)
"An action-adventure novel at that genre's best."-Publishers Weekly
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