Overview

Uniquely adopting a third-person omniscient point of view, Nightingale eschews the I of memoir in favor of multiple perspectives and a larger historical vision that afford equal time and weight to ally and enemy alike. Examples of the many perspectives based on real-life characters include: Hu, a VC informant whose false information led the Rangers straight into the jaws of a ferocious ambush; General Tanh, the COSVN commander; Major Nguyen Hiep, the 52d Ranger Commander; and Ranger POWs later returned by the North. Nightingale moreover offers the point of view of an American advisor to elite Vietnamese troops, a vital perspective regrettably underrepresented in the literature of Vietnam, including Burns's documentary. Added to this are well-informed conjecture of enemy psychology; insight into the dedication and often misunderstood role of the elite Vietnamese Ranger forces; the intelligence acquired from debriefing captured Rangers, whose captors had told them that the entire battle had been a carefully staged attack planned by COSVN as part of a larger Total War strategy developed by the leadership of the North Vietnamese Army; and an eyewitness account by a gifted author who is a rare survivor of one of the most vicious--and heretofore forgotten--battles of the war.

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Colonel Keith Nightingale (Ret) is that rarest of breeds-a hard-core military man who wields a pen as brilliantly as any weapon, and strategically deploys a full literary arsenal. Targeting our senses with the sights, sounds, smells, textures, and even the tastes of war, his myriad of minute physical details, visual similes, and extended metaphors invariably strike home. To quote Pulitzer-Prize winner Tom Ricks, contributing editor to Foreign Policy: If you want to know about war, Keith Nightingale is your man. Nightingale's work is further endorsed by General David Petraeus, General Volney Wagner, Susan Eisenhower, Emmy-winner Dennis Murphy, and other luminaries. David de Vries, an Earphones Award-winning audiobook narrator and veteran stage actor and director, spent three years in the cast of Wicked and was the last Lumiere in the Broadway production of Beauty and the Beast. He has also appeared in numerous films and voiced commercial campaigns for companies large and small, including American Express, AT&T, UPS, Motorola, Georgia-Pacific, Delta Airlines, Coca Cola, and Ford, among others. He can be seen in a number of feature films, including The Founder, The Accountant, Captain America: Civil War, and Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk. On television, his credits include House of Cards, Nashville, and Halt and Catch Fire.

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