Hanoi. Saigon. Dien Bien Phu. These exotic names surfaced in 1954 during a French offensive halfway across the world. But now American soldiers -- tested on Normandy's bloody beaches and Korea's minefields -- help challenge Ho Chi Minh's guerilla forces. To some, Indochina's hush-hush war was beyond foolish. To the Majors, it reached the heights of glory. "A major work...magnificent...powerful." (B-O-T Editorial Review Board). Polished veterans of WWII and the Korean War face off against Ho Chi Minh's guerillas. The glory of battle still reigns in a secret war.
They were the young ones, the bright ones, the ones with the dreams. From the wastes of North Africa to the bloody corridors of Europe, they answered the call gladly. War - it was their duty, their job, their life. They marched off as boys and they came back those who made it as soldiers and professionals, forged in the heat of battle.
Special Operations detective Matt Payne and his colleagues find themselves drawn into two dangerous cases simultaneously as an ongoing investigation into a squad of dirty cops turns deadly and a chance encounter at a party leads Payne to a woman who may hold the key to a gang of urban terrorists.
It was more than an incident. It was a deadly assault across the 38th parallel. It was the Korean War. In the fear and frenzy of battle, those who had served with heroism before were called again by America to man the trenches and sandbag bunkers. From Pusan to the Yalu, they drove forward with commands too new and tanks too old: brothers in war, bonded together in battle as they had never been in peace...
In Indochina, in Greece, in Korea and in the mine-covered European terrain, they were the men who were chiseled into fighting professionals. Now, as a decade flickers to an end, they must return to the States to sculpt a new kind of soldier: one that's rigorously tested in a new, simmering war.
