The Nhu Ky Sting

Continued from the first book, Gerber's squad is injured from the battle at camp A-555. The new mission to recover intel from a crashed plane in northern Vietnam, the squad is missing half the team, but add a new CIA man as well as Bao from the first book. This team has a suspenseful trek through the jungles, dealing with roving NVA patrols, and an excellent assault on the military camp to rescue the downed pilot. A very different perspective from the first book that was centered around base defense, this is a search and rescue mission deep in enemy territory. Interesting how the events of the series start before the official beginning of the war, the ending of this book concludes with the announcement of the war, putting the series in the historical timeline. A solid second entry, not as good as the first book, but again very realistic in the author puts you right there in the action as if you were a member of the squad.

I enjoyed The Nhu Ky Sting a lot more than the first book in the series, Body Count. It’s more suspenseful, and the story has a more satisfying arc. In this one, Capt. Mack Gerber and his A-team are sent on a secret mission into North Vietnam to extract the pilot of a U-2 spy plane who was shot down and captured by the NVA. The writing in this volume is slightly better than it was in Body Count, but it’s still not great, and there are still bits of action that I find unconscionable in the context of supposedly realistic military fiction (like Capt. Gerber running between two of the enemy and then dropping to one knee so that they shoot each other), but in general the authors keep things relatively plausible. They also seem to be sticking to the historical timeline, and they come up with a relatively clever way to incorporate the 1964 attack on the USS Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin into the fictional action of the book.