BROWN WATER: A Novel of the Vietnam War

Mekong Delta, 1968. Five men on a fiberglass boat. A river that hides everything beneath its surface.

PBR 621 patrols the brown water of the Bassac River—searching sampans, running canals, and counting the days. Harlan is the boat captain on his third tour. Pope cleans the twin .50-calibers every morning in the same order and reads Louis L'Amour westerns between firefights. Sugar is nineteen and writes letters to a girl he met twice. Vien is their Vietnamese Navy liaison who sees things in the water that no American can see.

When the Navy's new SEALORDS campaign pushes the crew from the wide rivers into the narrow canals of the Vam Co Dong—where the jungle closes overhead and the enemy waits in bunkers built from American intelligence—the men of PBR 621 find themselves alone on a waterway that wants them dead. Their only chart is the memory of a Vietnamese father who once paddled these same canals in a different country, before the war came to the water.

Brown Water is a novel written in the Hemingway tradition—spare, precise, devastating. It is the story of the forgotten river war in Vietnam, told from the deck of a thirty-one-foot patrol boat where the crew can touch both banks of the canal simultaneously. It is a story about what men carry when they cannot see through the water to the bottom. About the knowledge that lives in the men who fight, not in the reports they file. About a war that moved like a current—and carried everything south to the sea.

For readers of Matterhorn, The Things They Carried, and Fields of Fire. The Vietnam War novel you have never read—because no one has written the river war until now.