Casualties Of War – Daniel Lang, 1969 ★★★★½

Blood Brothers

Truth was called the first casualty of war way back in 1918, but other losses also factor into this real-life account of one U.S. soldier’s experience confronting atrocity and silence during the Vietnam War.

The most immediate and devastating was that of Phan Thi Mao, a young woman raped and murdered by four U. S. soldiers on a recon mission in Vietnam’s Central Highlands in November 1966. Casualties Of War details how killers and bystanders become war’s victims, too.

Up Country – Nelson DeMille, 2002 ★½

Back in Nam

Up Country is a thriller with few thrills, a cross-country jaunt that goes nowhere and sets up a finale that lands flat as a pancake after 700 pages.

Nelson DeMille had the craft to deliver much better. God knows he had more experience to draw upon than he wanted.

Paul Brenner is a retired U. S. Army investigator summoned back into service in 1997 to solve a 29-year-old crime committed during the height of the Tet Offensive in Vietnam. A Tet veteran himself, Brenner overcomes much reluctance to journey back to the land where he lost both his innocence and many comrades, a nation with its own deep wounds and a marked ambivalence about Americans.