Are we killing each other? Courtney pressed the towel harder against her palm. “You’re going onstage tonight and everyone’s gonna worship you. They’ll say you’re honest. Raw. Important.” Her mouth twisted. “Do you know what they’d call me if they saw this room right now?” Kurt looked at the broken glass, the red towel, the…
Eli whispered, “Sarah, stop.” But she couldn’t. Something in her had slipped its leash. “You want to know why he doesn’t tell you anything?” she said. “Because every time any of us feel something, you treat it like weakness. You don’t want children. You want soldiers.” Her mother inhaled sharply. Her father’s face drained of…
“Tell him,” his stepfather said, pointing at Kurt without looking at him. “Tell him he needs to grow up.” Kurt looked at his mother. She wouldn’t meet his eyes. That was worse than the yelling. Not anger. Not even disappointment. Just exhaustion. “Maybe,” she said softly, “maybe it would help if you found something steady.”…
He swallowed once, hard enough to be visible in his throat. Then he slung the guitar over his shoulder and walked to the door. Before he opened it, he said, almost to himself, “Honest things are the ones that hurt.” And then he stepped into the hallway, where the studio lights were already burning, the…
November 1966, Long Sun Island, deep in the Rangat swamp, a place the Vietong called the jungle of assassins. 400 Australian soldiers are about to jump from helicopters into a mangrove hell that has never been penetrated by Allied forces. They have no waterborne training, no specialized equipment, no idea what they are walking into….
243 dead, zero losses. One rubber plantation where Australian SAS turned patients into a weapon and 15 seconds into a massacre. June 1971, five men lying in mud for 3 days, watching the same enemy soldiers walk past at 3:00 in the morning like clockwork. On day four, they didn’t watch anymore. They harvested. The…
deployed to Vietnam in September 1966 as part of first marine division. Assigned to sniper platoon operating out of Hill 55 Firebase near Daong. Within 4 months, he’d killed more enemy combatants than any Marine sniper in the war. His primary weapon was a Winchester model 70306 rifle topped with an eight power unurtle scope,…
Not 200 soldiers, not even 400. His B company hatchet force had landed directly in the operational security perimeter of the North Vietnamese Army’s second regiment headquarters. Approximately 600 enemy soldiers, artillery positions, command bunkers, supply depots, organized defensive fighting positions with interlocking fields of fire. A division level base area that American intelligence had…
Units that had been at full strength in January were decimated by February. The D445 Battalion, the 274th Regiment, the 33rd NVA Regiment. All of them took devastating casualties. But here’s what that created. These enemy units weren’t destroyed. They were wounded and retreating. They were falling back to their jungle sanctuaries in the Hat…
They could destroy anything they could see. The problem was they could not see anything. The North Vietnamese army and Vietnome controlled when battles happened. They attacked when conditions favored them and vanished when they did not. Standard American infantry battalions, 80 to 100 men moving in formation, conducted massive sweeps through the jungle designed…
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