Book description
In Black Hawk Down, the fight went on for a day. In We Were
Soldiers Once & Young, the fighting lasted three days. In
The Village, one Marine squad fought for 495 days -- half of
them died.
Few American battles have been so extended, savage and personal. A
handful of Americans volunteered to live among six thousand
Vietnamese, training farmers to defend their village. Such
"Combined Action Platoons" (CAPs) are now a lost footnote
about how the war could have been fought; only the villagers remain to
bear witness. This is the story of fifteen resolute young Americans
matched against two hundred Viet Cong; how a CAP lived, fought and
died. And why the villagers remember them to this day.
Leatherneck Magazine A fantastic, down in the
mud and crud book of enlisted Marines fighting to defend a
village....West tells of some of the victories and the tragic cost.
And he tells it well.
Francis J. "Bing" West served in Vietnam
as a Marine infantry officer, and later as Assistant Secretary of
Defense for International Security Affairs, Dean of Research at the
Naval War College, an analyst at the RAND Corporation, and a lead CNN
commentator during Desert Storm. He is currently president of the GAMA
Corporation. A frequent contributor to defense journals, West is also
the author of Small Unit Action in Vietnam, and Naval Forces and
National Security. His new novel, The Pepperdogs, is available
from Simon & Schuster. Visit his Web site at www. westwrite. com
