Sergeant Dickinson: A Novel

Sergeant Dickinson is the radioman of a Special Forces A-Team in the Central Highlands of Vietnam. The camp is encircled and attacked for nine days by the North Vietnamese Army, anxious to lure larger American units into combat for the first time. Dickinson 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.
The war grows ever larger and darker but Dickinson has the ethereal clarity of a person who has been shot at: "the almost dying and the not dying. Afterwards is the best thing there is."