Lost Soldiers by James H. Webb

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The author of five critically acclaimed novels returns to the world of his signature bestseller, Fields of Fire, with this explosive tale set in present-day Vietnam.

From the Publisher

"Brandon Condley survived five years of combat as a U.S. Marine only to lose the woman he loved to an enemy assassin. Now he is back in Vietnam, working to recover the remains of unknown American soldiers. On a routine mission, Condley finds a body that doesn't match its dog tags - a body that propels him into a vortex of violence and intrigue where past and present become one. As the mystery of the dead man unravels, a link is revealed to two well-known killers: "Salt and Pepper," a pair of treasonous Americans who led a deadly Viet Cong ambush against Condley's own men. Galvanized by a fresh trail to these long-lost deserters, Condley has finally found a purpose: Under the auspices of his government job, he is going to hunt down the traitors. On his own, he is going to kill them." Condley's hunt cannot be kept secret from his former enemies, or his friends. And in the shadows that linger from Vietnam's long season of darkness and terror, he has no way of knowing which side is more dangerous. Surrounding him is an unforgettable cast of characters: Dzung, Condley's closest friend, a South Vietnamese war hero who might have led his country if his side had won the war, now reduced to driving a cyclo as his family starves in Saigon's District Four. Colonel Pham, a battle-hardened Viet Cong soldier who lost three children to American bombs. Manh, a cutthroat Interior Ministry official who blackmails Dzung into a mission of murder. The Russian soldier Anatolie Petrushinskey, who left his soul in Vietnam as his empire collapsed around him. And the beautiful Van, Colonel Pham's daughter, who spurns the scars of war as she pursues her dreams of freedom. As Condley stalks his elusive prey across old battlefields and throughout Eurasia, returning always to the brooding streets of Saigon, his mission - and the odds of his surviving it - grow more precarious with each step he takes toward the truth.

Tom Wolfe

In my opinion, the finest of the Vietnam novels.

Walter Anderson

A masterpiece, one of the most poignant and powerful novels of this generation ... Lost Soldiers is one of those rare books that is not only a beautifully realized literary triumph but also a crackling good page-turner. Its seamless blend of mystery and intrigue, with its subtle truths of history and culture and its stories of love and honor played out by unforgettable characters, is nothing short of miraculous. Jim Webb did not set out to write a healing book, but that is what he has done. I suspect Lost Soldiers can bring my country together after years of debate and division and it took a warrior to write it. You will come away a different person after you’ve read it.

John McCain

With The Emperor’s General, Jim Webb cements his reputation as an extraordinarily gifted storyteller. He excels in mining the rich veins of history to invest his fiction with the drama of great events.... An engrossing, moving, and splendid book.

Newsweek

In swift, flexible prose that does everything he asks of it, Webb gives us an extraordinary range of acutely observed people.... Fields of Fire is a stunner.

Houston Post

Few writers since Stephen Crane have portrayed men at war with such a ring of steely truth.

Oregonian

A novel of such fullness and impact, one is tempted to compare it with Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead.

Washington Post Book World

Webb writes history with an urgency and clarity that makes it pop from the page.

Houston Post

Few writers since Stephen Crane have portrayed men at war with such a ring of steely truth.

Washington Post Book World

Webb writes history with an urgency and clarity that makes it pop from the page.

Caspar Weinberger - Forbes

WE GO TO WAR

Our response to the Sept. 11 horror is exactly right. The only opposition seems to be coming from academic left-wingers who fancy themselves fashionable in their constant and now-frantic efforts to blame America, even for Sept. 11.

Had we failed to launch the continual, strong attacks that we have, we would have told terrorists around the world that it is safe to attack America with impunity. The road we have chosen is the right one. It will be long, and not without risk. If the patience and strength of our country matches those of our leadership, we will win.

THE BOOKS OF SUMMER IX

This annual review of books read during the summer in Maine is appearing now because far more important events intervened. These books, however, are worth reading anytime.

John Adams (Simon & Schuster, $35) is David McCullough's magisterial and altogether wonderful bi-ography. Joseph Ellis' 1993 biography of Adams began the process of demonstrating how much we owe to this most extraordinary of our founding fathers. McCullough completes the rescue of our second President from the comparative obscurity to which the far better known lives of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin had seemingly condemned him.

Adams, a Massachusetts farmer and lawyer, was a proud descendant of the Puritans and outdid some of them in his rigid rectitude. He had a towering intellect, refined and toned by his Harvard education. He scorned those of lesser intellect and some who simply disagreed with his firmly held opinions. Anyone subjected to his disdain was not likely to forget it.

Adams worked endlessly for causes he believed in, especially personal liberty and freedom fromoppression. He was unwilling to compromise in the least on anything remotely resembling a matter of principle. But these character-istics enabled him and his sometimes irritated colleagues (no mean intellects themselves) to work together to produce our democracy. We probably would never have taken the extreme step of severing relations with Great Britain without Adams' relentless pursuit of what he saw as necessary to secure our freedom and our future.

Some of the finest chapters are those involving Adams' responsibilities representing the Colonies' interests in France, which led to France's committing troops to our Revolution. In all this Adams was far more than aided by his extraordinary wife, Abigail. Almost a dual biography, this book includes perhaps the first full appreciation of how much Abigail contributed to the Revolution and our nation's birth.

The summer was also enlivened by a controversial little book, The Jefferson-Hemings Myth: An American Travesty (Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society, $11.95). Ten contributors, including editor Eyler Robert Coates Sr. and Bahman Batmanghelidj, offer virtually irrefutable proof that Jefferson did not father a child by Sally Hemings, a myth that many have come to accept.

Three novels, brilliantly written, with fascinating narratives, completed this summer's fare. Readers may recall my unbounded admiration for James Webb, one of our finest war novelists since Stephen Crane. It is a pleasure to re-port that Webb's Lost Soldiers (Bantam Books, $25) is fully up to his high standards--taut with skillfully nar-rated realism. It is a tale of the search for two American traitors who caused the death of Marines in a remote outpost in Vietnam. No one else has ever conveyed better the dangers, risks and horrors of our war in Vietnam. Once again we see and live through the misery, terror and hardship of infantry fighting in that strange land--a land that Webb has clearly come to love.

Death in Holy Orders, by P.D. James (Knopf, $25), is the latest of the Adam Dalgliesh mysteries. An ordinand's death at a small theological college leads into a tale of multiple murders and horribly sacrilegious acts, along with the familiar descriptions and character studies that distinguish all of Baroness James' works. This is a most reward-ing and skillfully constructedexample of the classic mystery as told by a master of the art.

One of the nicest short books I've read in a long time is Girl With a Pearl Earring, by Tracy Chevalier (Plume, $12). This is the tale of painter Johannes Vermeer and his tumultuous household in 1660s Holland. But it is also the story of his 16-year-old housemaid and model, Griet, who sat for the glorious portrait "Girl With a Pearl Ear-ring." This is a most delightful lesson in art history, as well as a study in vivid contrasts between Vermeer's life and that of his most famous model.

Publishers Weekly

Webb's cultural and political portrayal of Vietnam 25 years after the war's end is delivered with such bold strokes and magical detail that it really doesn't matter that the plot itself is relegated to the backseat. This is a highly personal and empathetic look at today's Vietnam, a land of misery and inequity, yet one still vibrantly alive. The story follows the experiences of Brandon Condley, an ex-Marine whose job it is to find missing American soldiers, dead or alive. Condley is trying to track down Theodore Deville, an army grunt who not only deserted his unit in 1969 and killed a fellow serviceman, but then joined the ranks of the enemy. Condley is convinced Deville is still alive, operating somewhere in southeast Asia's underground economy. Webb introduces a rich cast of supporting characters as Condley pursues his quarry across Vietnam, Australia, the former Soviet Union and Thailand. Among the most delicately etched is Dzung, a former South Vietnamese officer now relegated, like thousands of others on the losing side, to a menial station in life, one that he and his family have no hope of escaping. Such characters, as well as the highly textured mood and atmosphere that Webb creates, tend to further eclipse the main narrative and shift the focus to the moral consequences and social fallout of the war. This detailed, lovingly drawn portrait of Vietnam reveals a sad, tortured country that has never recovered from the horrifying events of a quarter-century ago. Major print and radio advertising. (Sept. 4) Forecast: Webb (Fields of Fire) is no stranger to the bestseller lists; endorsements from heavy hitters like Sen. John McCain will help put him there once again. Copyright 2001Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Some of the memories were horrible. A few of them were good. But all of them had meaning. Thus begins a gripping tale of mystery and intrigue set in present-day Vietnam. The center of this fine novel is the search for two army deserters who led U.S. troops into ambush and then hid in North Vietnam after the hostilities ceased. Like the best of such tales, however, the novel offers more than the resolution of a mystery: it also tells a poignant story of a love that might have been and of friendship across partisan lines and is rich with the sounds and smells of its foreign setting. Former Secretary of the Navy and Assistant Secretary of Defense Webb (also the author of the best-selling Fields of Fire and other novels) has used his familiarity with the Far East to evoke the tangled net of loyalties and enmities bequeathed to a troubled country by a savage history of conflict. This exceptionally well-written book tells a gripping tale; enthusiastically recommended. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 5/1/01.]David Keymer, Zayed Univ., Dubai Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

The author of Fields of Fire (not reviewed), one of the best Vietnam War novels ever, sends a fictional ex-Marine to contemporary Vietnam to hunt down a murderous deserter. Webb, a former Marine and secretary of the Navy, offers a heartbreaking portrait of modern Vietnam in the character of Dzung, a highly skilled soldier who lost his family fighting the communists and now makes a paltry living as a Saigon bicycle cabbie: home is a miserable shack where he lives with his young wife and five children, one of whom is dying of an infectious disease. Dzung is a close friend of Brandon Condley's, a former Marine who stayed in Southeast Asia after the war as a security consultant and freelance trouble-shooter for the CIA. Condley blows into Saigon with Hanson Muir, a pompous but well-meaning forensic anthropologist searching for the remains of American soldiers. When Dzung learns that the bones of Muir's latest find are not those of the American deserter Theodore Deville, a homicidal turncoat Marine who liked to sever the hands of his victims and who led an ambush on Condley's platoon during the war, he is forced by a member of the Vietnamese security to begin training as an assassin. Condley is sure that Deville is still alive, and he uses his almost too cordial friendship with retired Communist Intelligence operative Colonel Pham (Pham's daughter, Van, has a crush on Condley) to dig up clues (and another body) in a forbidding hilltop village; a Soviet observer's seedy Moscow apartment; and in some sleazy Bangkok dives, where Deville might be working as a drug smuggler with the Vietnamese Communist regime. Meanwhile, Dzung wonders whether he'll be able to kill his best friend Condley when theinevitable command comes. Vividly atmospheric settings steal the show from Webb's meandering story as Condley visits old soldiers from both sides of the conflict, united in their inexplicable love for Vietnam.

Product Details

• ISBN: 0440240913
  
• ISBN-13: 9780440240914
• Format: Mass Market Paperback, 464pp
• Publisher: Bantam Books
• Pub. Date: August 2002
• Edition Description: Reprint
• Sales Rank: 77,858

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