First, I want to note the outstanding use of the English language here - tight, descriptive writing that serves plot, character, and setting well - not a word out of place. It's great to read a book that was clearly well-written and then well-edited. The characters are well-drawn, just enough to make them clear and compelling. Soliloquies are always purposeful and pointed.The author maintains that the story is true, and if so, in his hands, it serves as a perfect metaphor for the whole of the war. The author captures the absolute chaos that was Viet Nam - even before we arrived - and the ensuing mess that we made of a war in a land that we never understood. The tumultuous intersection in the village of Cheo Reo of the NVA and ARVN, Montagnards and Vietnamese, the Army and the CIA, the doctor and the shaman is captured perfectly as are the colliding beliefs that create and sustain the tension and conflict in this novel.This book parallels the great documentary, "The Fog of War" but offers the perspective of the men who were called upon to carry out the ever-changing, conflicting imperatives and orders handed down from the White House to the Pentagon to Saigon to provincial capitals to the small outposts where the war was actually being fought.Over all it has more in common with the work of Le Carré - a spy novel set against the war in Viet Nam.A great book? Not my call, but certainly a darn fine one.