#I'm not incompetent; I'm capable of working to a high standard but that's not SPECIAL and it's definitely not Right to talk about it

[the-busy-ghost]

I hate STAR interview questions, I can never remember specific instances of things I've done well and if I talk about a time I had to step in to clear up a mess that I didn't create, it always sounds like I'm bitching about a colleague and that's just not Decent

[casbooks]

Book 45 of 2024 (★★★★★)

Title: Napalm Dreams Authors: John F. Mullins

Series: 1 of Men of Valor ISBN: 9781416503361 Rating: ★★★★★ Subject Books.Fiction.Military.Vietnam.Men of Valor, Books.Military.20th-21st Century.Asia.Vietnam War.Fiction

Description: A shattering novel of courage, heroism, and unbreakable bonds forged in the heat of battle. Green Beret Captain Finn McCulloden and his troops are having a very bad day -- even by the nightmarish standards of Vietnam. They've just been dropped into a meat grinder with orders to reinforce a Special Forces border camp that's about to be overrun by the North Vietnamese. Outnumbered twenty-to-one, beset by treachery from within, and saddled with an incompetent second-in-command, McCulloden knows that all hell is about to break loose. Through one brutal day and night McCulloden and his men fight alongside their native Montagnard allies in a pitched battle of blood and guts against an unwavering foe who never stops coming. The Green Berets can neither give up nor give in, and all will become heroes in the truest sense of the word. But one extraordinary soldier man rises above them all in an ultimate act of valor….

My Review: Wow… Mullins is an incredible author who knows how to keep a books pacing moving forward at just the right speed while juggling multiple points of view and maintaining tension until the final words are printed.

While at first it feels like you're being inundated with all of the different characters, by the end of the book, so many of them have been fleshed out, their stories told, that they become more than just cardboard placeholders in many respects. You honestly get a sense of what the characters are thinking, feeling, and experiencing. Mullins finds ways to make you really like the people he writes about, to understand that they're humans, flaws and all. The thing is, like Mark Berent's books, while the focus is on a single group of people in a single place, you are also taken on side stories which gives you a broader look at all of the set pieces involved in the battle. Sometimes this can be distracting in books, but here, it helps to twist the mounting tension in a different direction and keeps the adrenaline and feelings at a high clip. I do have two gripes though. One is that this is an author who knows what he's talking about and sometimes I feel like I'm back sitting on bleachers under a hot sun learning exactly how det cord works down to the chemical processes. For those who love minutiae detail, Mullins serves it up in bag fulls, but for others, it's easy to skim past that and not have it be too annoying or distracting at all. And Two, the deus ex machina at the end of the book. If it was capable of doing that at the end, why wasn't it at the beginning and middle and throughout? That still bothers me. Beyond those two issues, it's still a 5 star and a really great piece of fiction about the Vietnam War.