The Tiger By the Tail

 You name it: fiction, mystery, thriller, war story, romance, political thriller, suspenseful novel.  Up Country by Nelson DeMille is all that, besides being a good story.  The main character is Paul Brenner, a retired Army detective.  He had just retired, when his former commander asked him to solve one more crime.  This is the plot.

During the Vietnam War, a wounded Vietnamese Cong was on the second floor, trying to remain quiet when he witnessed a terrible crime taking place, below him on the first floor, by the Americans.  This building had been bombed and there were gaps in the floor.  This Cong wrote what happened to his brother, also a Vietnamese soldier, who was killed.  The letter was found and kept as a souvenir by an American soldier.  Many years later, the American soldier decided to send the letter to the United Staes Army/Government, for historical value or whatever.  When the letter was translated the government realized that a crime had been committed and wanted the perpetrator punished. That's the assignment Paul Brenner was given and that's all the reader knows and understands, too.

Brenner has the name, and the Vietnamese village the witness came from.  That's all.  Brenner doesn't even know if the witness was still alive. If he's dead, that the end of the assignment.  If he isn't, Brenner needs to get a positive identification of the perpetrator.  

I think I enjoyed this book so much because I was alive and can identify (in a way) with the times.  I was a twenty-something year old, during the war, and was both anti-war, and very busy with career, marriage, and new family, to really understand what soldiers like Paul Brenner were going through.  I know less than a handful of people who were in the war.

1.  Joe spent the entire war as a dental hygienist, in Japan.

2.  Tom who was a typist in an office, there.

3.  A cribbage partner, who won't talk about it.

4.  A priest who led platoons and had a bounty on his head, as did other platoon leaders.  The witness of the South Vietnamese soldiers, fighting for their homeland, led him to the priesthood.  The soldiers were devout.  

I was not prepared for the descriptions of fighting in Up Country.  I also hesitate to recommend this book to one of my book clubs.  It is gory--too descriptive of the violence perpetrated during war. Nevertheless, I thoroughly enjoyed the story. I learned, I laughed, I gagged, I cried, I blushed, and I sighed with relief when the crime was exposed.  I'll be thinking about UP Country, for a long time.