BURN THE RIDGE

A NOVEL

Vietnam, 1968. A sergeant. Seven men. A ridge that doesn't care if they live or die.

Sergeant Jack Calhoun has nineteen months in-country and two tours behind him. He knows how to keep men alive. He knows how to read terrain, clean a weapon, and walk into a kill zone without letting the fear take his hands. What he doesn't know is how to follow an order he knows will destroy his squad.

When Bravo Company is ordered to assault a fortified ridge in the Central Highlands — against an enemy force three times the size that intelligence admits, with eight minutes of artillery support instead of thirty, and no air cover — Calhoun must make a choice that will define him for the rest of his life.

Behind him are seven men: Kerr, the three-tour corporal with thirty-three days left who won't go to the rear. Phan, the Vietnamese-American point man who reads the jungle the way other men read scripture. Deacon, the seminary student whose hands have learned to throw grenades. Spooner, the machine gunner who is afraid of the dark. Hutton, the radio operator who is secretly documenting every failure of command in a notebook hidden inside his radio. Tillman, who writes letters to a girl who stopped writing back. And Lasker, the replacement who arrived six days ago with clean boots and no idea what was coming.

They will climb the ridge together. What happens there — and what Calhoun refuses to do — will be remembered.

BURN THE RIDGE is a novel about the men who fight, the men who send them, and the distance between those two kinds of courage.

For readers of Matterhorn, Fields of Fire, and The Things They Carried.