Returning to the Vietnam,he knew as an American soldier, John Halliday searches for his older brother Nic, who disappeared during the war. Frustrated by arcane bureaucracies, his own PTSD inertia and two dead friends comically haunting him to join them, Halliday enlists the help of poet My Linh, a heroine of the "American War."The two go on an epic VW bus journey crossing Vietnam, finding threadbare clues to Nic's disappearance and falling in love as they follow the clues south and...

The American War in Viet Nam was many different wars. Since the end of that war, thousands of books have been written that try to make sense of what was a horrific, moral collapse on the part of the United States and its allies. What separates Daktoum from the rest of these books is the author's precise focus on the middle ground of the war, a middle ground that could become an otherworldly place, defined by its own laws, and sometimes ruled by officers deemed unfit to be in comba...