Freemantle wrote this novel at the peak of POW fever - a frantic passion that gripped America for almost thirty years, convinced that increasingly elderly POWs were being held - for some reason - in the victorious Vietnam. At times this belief was held by 80 percent of the country; the lack of solid evidence, reliable eyewitness statements or even a shadow of a doubt among the incredibly over-documented archives of the Vietnam conflict did nothing to assuage it.  And between the lines of this novel you can see the sickness this belief was a symptom of. Americans couldn't believe, of themselves, that they had spent a solid fifteen years obliterating a poor nation for nothing, torturing, dropping more bombs every week than had been dropped in all of World War II. It had to have been a noble, heroic sacrifice, or else the nation weren't just losers, the nation was a monster that had massacred its way to defeat, a spasm of corruption, the flag a banner of technocapitalistic evil that deserved to be defeated. Heroism and "tough choices" are the sugar that helps America swallow the defeat.  

Freemantle is too much of a keen observer to miss that the war was a war, and that the desperation for heroic feelings about the war distorted America, still distorts America, will distort us until, someday, a moral conviction may be found to let us see ourselves clearly.  And this distortion is at the heart of the book.  A British journalist returns to Vietnam in search of a story about his father's involvement in a heroic, doomed action.  It's no twist to learn that the heroism wasn't what it seemed to be.  You know it from the start - and you get the feeling that he does too.  There's a half twist near the end where it almost seems like his father was a hero after all, and that perks your interest. But in the end Freemantle reiterates that the war was just a war and Americans are just like any other nation at war since nations and wars have been.  And he can't quite bring himself to point, firmly and without flinching, at the gap between what Americans were in Vietnam and what they had to think they were in Vietnam.  The gap is in this book. You can read it. He didn't miss it!  But he can't indict it.

Still, the journalist's story is strong enough. While it makes sense for there to be a tense Special Forces scene in the book, I almost would give it up just to stay in the journalist's head, to navigate things he doesn't know and we don't know.  To not know things he will never know.