War is terrible, but if there is any redeeming quality to war it is its capacity for bringing out the truly exceptional. One of the last Americans left in Vietnam in 1972, USMC Captain John Ripley blocked one of the armored spearheads of the Easter Offensive almost singlehandedly. The bridge at Dong Ha was a massive US-constructed steel and iron span, and under heavy fire Ripley crawled out again and again to wire the bridge for demolition, buying precious days for the collapsing South Vietnamese army to reorganize.

It is almost impossible to state how brave Ripley was, and therin lies the flaw in this book (and why it gets three stars). While Miller paints excellent portraits of Ripley, his Vietnamese comrades, and the chaos of conflict, he doesn't quite manage a coherent picture of what Ripley did. I know that he crawled and swung underneath the bridge under intense fire, dragged heavy crates of TNT hundreds of feet, wired detonators with improvised tools that could've blown his head off, and then went back to rig an secondary electrical detonation, but for all that, I'm fuzzy on the physical details of how Ripley succeeded. A solid book, particularly for the single fragment of the war it presents, but one that doesn't achieve greatness.

One useful trick I did learn was that if you need to severe heavy steal beams with high explosives, place your charges slightly offset on either side like 'crooked earmuffs'. If the charges are directly across one another, the blast will cancel itself out. The more you know!