Blackhorse Riders: A Desperate Last Stand, an Extraordinary Rescue Mission, and the Vietnam Battle America Forgot

Philip Keith. A fine, precisely detailed record of an obscure but nasty battle in Vietnam in which heroism was forgotten even more quickly than the war itself. Keeping the traditional patriotic overlay to a minimum and with only a modest amount of invented dialogue, Keith provides engrossing, almost minute-by-minute account of the preliminaries and the battle itself. Military buffs will take it in stride, but Americans accustomed to 30 years of campaigns in which a single soldier's death is news and more than one makes the front page will squirm to read that in the typical war, men die en masse.--Kirkus (Check Catalog)