The Beast, Raymond Hunter Pyle’s fourth and final novel featuring Marines in Vietnam tells a story about a small outpost during the final months before the Third Marine Division was pulled out of combat in Vietnam. For Marines, the Vietnam conflict was different in I-Corps along the DMZ, different and more massively deadly than the conflict in other parts of the country. That’s not to say the Army and other Marine units didn’t have a deadly time further south, but in northern I-Corps along the Z, south to Khe Sanh and the A-Shau valley, east to Cua Viet and west to Laos, and all of ...

In 1965, Hank Tucker and his Brother Toby were out of draft deferments when they discovered an AFL/CIO poster in the union hiring hall advertising a Navy enlistment program offering advanced enlisted paygrades to construction men with extensive experience in the trades and heavy equipment. Just sign up for a thirty month enlistment and they could enter the Navy Seabees as instant petty officers. At that point, joining one of the services was the only way they could avoid getting drafted and joining the Navy sounded like the best deal in town. No guns. No foxholes. No battles. It didn't ...

A secret revealed on his father’s death bed leads young Peter Lucas to become the U.S. Army’s most lethal sniper in a story that twists and turns from the frozen battlefield in Korea to the sweltering jungles of Vietnam. Along the way Peter is transformed from a high school football star into a deadly shadow warrior. Losing his father throws his world upside down, but a request for information about his father’s past sets in motion a string of events that will forever change Peter’s life. A family history he had never known pushes Peter into the world of clandestine operations. His ...

The true story of Lieutenant Steve Joyner, who carried all the traits of a "perfect Marine" - character, compassion, determination, patriotism . . . an All-American football star. But then came the harsh and unforgiving realities of combat in Vietnam. How the two worlds he inhabited both connected and conflicted reveals the character of an extraordinary man gone far too soon. "Promise Lost is a touching, crisply rendered account of a Marine lieutenant who fell heroically in the final, bloody days of the 1968 battle for Khe Sanh while leading a counterattack into the teeth of an overwhelming...

Each soldier in Vietnam fought his own war. For some it was a war with loneliness, boredom, and endless fatigue. For others it was a war with unyielding jungle, mountains, and disease. For still others it was a war with terror and death and all of the above. And then there was the secret war fought mostly by Army Special Forces and Navy Seals. For these secret warriors, the war was seldom boring and always dangerous. The mountains and jungles of Laos and Cambodia were their playground, and disease, terror, and death stalked them on every mission. Sergeant First Class Ed Potter, returning ...