In combat, there are moments you can't take back. Targets you never meant to hit. Roads you go down and never return from. One of the bravest military accounts on record, whose scorching terrain lies somewhere between Loc Ninh and "the Fishhook," banned in all but the freest of countries, this formerly untold story is a most intimate vantage point into a world where warriors from different cultures and orientations came together under one American flag to engage a well-camouflaged enemy that continued to rise up from the ashes.

Calm, cold, ultramasculine LT Mike Hinrich, fit to lead and win battles against all odds, finds himself falling in love during wartime against his will, and his momentous change of heart reflects the fullness of his courage. Some men are lookers, and PFC Dave Bairstow is an adorable grunt, totally straight, at war at eighteen, and for whom his hero worship of Mike begets the inconceivable. Father Tony Rimbondi, the stern Catholic priest, must weigh the urgency of pastoral calling against the irresolvability of the human condition; becoming the base's sleuth, he discovers cases of "war fatigue" he can't comprehend or absolve, including his own.

A lonely, fetish-prone base commander and his ragtag Vietnam War-era troops grapple with the hell of war, an inglorious vigilante and highly compromising adult situations. Real desire. Risky passes. Riveting action. CPT Ennus McClure has a big problem. He commands a rowdy, intrepid U.S. Army forward operating base (FOB) at the height of the Vietnam War. Coalitions on either side of the wire want Ennus to fail. His new head of security is a godsend. Or is he? Rumor has it Military Police LT Mike Hinrich is "Der Hinrichter." The Executioner. As dead bodies turn up on base, the enemy is not the first suspect on Ennus's mind, and the jarring ending to this rampaging "who-dunnit" will be the terrifying one you never suspected.