Sergeant Dickinson by Jerome Gold

From the Publisher

Sergeant Dickinson is the 05-Bravo-the radioman-of a Special Forces A Team in the Central Highlands of Vietnam in the mid-sixties.

The camp is encircled and attacked for nine days by the North Vietnamese Army, anxious to lure large American forces into combat for the first time. He survives, just. The remnants of the team are broken up, the soldiers scattered among other commands. A unit that battered, goes the thinking, can't be put back together. Can he?

The war grows ever larger and darker, but Dickinson has the clarity of a person who has been shot at, "the almost dying and then not dying. Afterwards is the best thing there is."

There are a handful of them-Men Without Women, A Walk in the Sun-small, stunning books about men and war. Sergeant Dickinson, says Nelson DeMille, is one of those "classics."

Nelson DeMille

The hard-hitting simplicity of Hemingway, and the imagination of Philip Caputo . . . Truly remarkable and original.

The New York Times Book Review - Dwight Garner

...[F]ew novels in any genre are as lucid, or as memorably spooky, as Jerome Gold's...Sergeant Dickinson; it belongs on the high, narrow shelf of first-rate fiction about battlefield experience....[H]e expertly dismantles the myth — dear to civilians as well as to soldiers — that if you do everything right no harm will come to you.

Bloomsbury Review

Moving and disturbing.

New York Times Book Review

Belongs on the high, narrow shelf of first-rate fiction about battlefield experience.

Kirkus Reviews

The grim resignation that replaces fear in the psyches of combat soldiers under fire is vividly dramatized in this latest from Russell (The Prisoner•s Son, 1996, etc.): an in-your-face character study of an American radioman assigned to a Special Forces unit based in Pleiku in central Viet Nam at the height of the late war. Eponymous protagonist Ray Dickinson is an understandably embittered veteran in a story that begins with his unsparing description of the job of sorting out and disposing of dead bodies; that embraces standard-issue vilification of military myopia,

What People Are Saying

Nelson DeMille
The hard-hitting simplicity of Hemingway and the imagination of Philip Caputo . . . remarkable and original.

Gloria Emerson
Extraordinary, spooky, hallucinatory . . . Don't think you've already read enough books about Vietnam-here comes a truly great one.

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