Paco Sullivan is the only man in Alpha Company to survive a cataclysmic Viet Cong attack on Fire Base Harriette in Vietnam. Everyone else is annihilated. When a medic finally rescues Paco almost two days later, he is waiting to die, flies and maggots covering his burnt, shattered body. He winds up back in the US with his legs full of pins, daily rations of Librium and Valium, and no sense of what to do next. One evening, on the tail of a rainstorm, he limps off the bus and into the small town of Boone, determined to find a real job and a real bed but no matter how hard he works, nothing...

In 1967 Larry Heinemann was sent to Vietnam as an ordinary soldier. It was the most horrific year of his life, truly altering him and his family forever. In his powerful memoir, Heinemann returns to Vietnam, riding the train from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh city and confronting the memories of his war year. Black Virgin Mountain confirms Heinemann s legendary plain-spoken reputation as one of the essential chroniclers of our war in Vietnam"

"The only one of my contemporaries who I felt had more talent than myself was James Jones. And he has also been the one writer of any time for whom I felt any love."--Norman Mailer
Paris. May, 1968. This is the Paris of the barricaded boulevards of rebelling students' strongholds, of the literati, the sexual anarchists, the leftists--written chillingly of a time in French history closely paralleling America in the late '60s. The reader sees, feels, smells and fears all the turmoil of the frightening social quicksand of 1968.
James Jones (1921-1977) established himself as one of the...