The Ia Drang: A Vietnam War Novel of the 1st Cavalry at X-Ray and Albany

November 1965. The Central Highlands. Ray Halvorsen, nineteen years old, lies in a shallow hole at Landing Zone X-Ray while mortar rounds walk across the elephant grass and the man beside him prays in a voice Ray cannot hear.

Before the sun comes up, Ray will fire his rifle at a shape in the grass and watch it stop moving. Before the week is over, he will walk the column to Landing Zone Albany and learn why half the men around him will never walk out of it.

Sixteen months earlier, a letter from the Webster County Local Board arrived on a Tuesday in late July at a farm outside Corwin, Iowa. Ray read it once on the running board of his father's pickup, and then he read it slower, to make sure he had read it right. Greetings, it said. You are hereby ordered to report for induction. The word Vietnam was not in the letter. On the day the letter was written, there had been nothing for it to say.

Now Ray is in the Ia Drang Valley with the 1st Cavalry Division. He has a girl named Mary back home, a seventh-grade photograph of her in his breast pocket, a page torn from his mother's Bible holding half of the Twenty-seventh Psalm, and a best friend named Arlen Buchmeier who has forty-eight hours to live.

What follows is the story of what Vietnam takes from Ray, what it gives him, and what it asks him to carry home.

A sweeping, intimate novel of infantry combat in the opening year of the American ground war, The Ia Drang follows one Iowa farm boy through the crucible that made Vietnam what it became. From the red clay of Fort Polk to the LZ at Camp Radcliff; from a fight in the grass called Happy Valley to the ambush at Albany; from the 6th Convalescent Hospital at Cam Ranh Bay to a rice paddy in Bình Định Province where a medic named Doc Arroyo gives Ray a gift that will travel with him the rest of his days.

"It was not wind so much as the corn talking to itself, a continuous soft whisper he had known all his life and had learned, as a child, not to hear."

This novel contains:

• The Ia Drang campaign of November 1965, told from the rifleman's-eye view - LZ X-Ray, the column to Albany, the long night at the termite mound, and the walk out
• An unflinching rendering of jungle combat with the 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile) during its first months in country
• A chapter from inside the mind of Captain Nguyen Van Thuan, North Vietnamese Army, who fought the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 and returned to war eleven years later
• Father Patrick Maddox, a Catholic chaplain from Erie, Pennsylvania, whose single sentence - You are not alone in the dark - will follow Ray from a tent at Camp Radcliff to a cornfield in Iowa
• A love story that is also a letter story, and that refuses to pretend a year in Vietnam leaves anyone the same

For readers of John Podlaski's Cherries, David Allin's Vengeance, Karl Marlantes's Matterhorn, and Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried.

The Boys Who Didn't Come Home - an ongoing series following the men of the 1st Cavalry Division and the families who waited.

Book Two: Rotor Wash - now available. While Ray Halvorsen walked the valley floor at Ia Drang, a Huey was overhead. Rotor Wash follows Hollis Caudill, a door gunner with the 227th Assault Helicopter Battalion, into the Vinh Thanh Valley in 1966 - and back to West Virginia, where the engine in the garage and the woman who waited are both still there. Father Maddox is in both books. The war is in both books. The cost of coming home is in both books.

If you finished The Ia Drang and want to stay in the valley a little longer - Hollis's door is open.