IRON IN THE JUNGLE

A VIETNAM WAR NOVEL

De: William Ferrier Jr.

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

The loader's job is simple. Lift the round. Seat the round. Say the word.

Up.

One word. Twenty-five pounds. Nine seconds between life and death.

David Marsh arrives in the Central Highlands of Vietnam in 1967 as a replacement loader on an M48 Patton tank called Big Brawler. He is twenty years old. He knows nothing. The crew — a commander who measures men like equipment, a gunner who can put a round through a window at two thousand yards, a driver who prays with his hands on the hull — will teach him everything, or he will die before the teaching is finished.

From the red-dust roads of Pleiku to the twenty-six-day hell of the Battle of Hue, Marsh rises through the crew — loader to gunner to tank commander — carrying a green notebook passed hand to hand by the men who came before him. Each page holds what the pages can hold. What they cannot hold, the men carry themselves.

Then the Americans leave. And the war does not.

In a final act of devastating scope, the story shifts to Captain Minh of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam — an ARVN tanker fighting the same war in a lighter tank with thinner armor and no replacements coming. As South Vietnam falls in 1975, Minh's crew makes a last stand that answers the question the novel has been asking since its first page: What remains when the machine stops and the men walk away?

A novel about what steel holds and what it cannot. About the word a loader says when the gun is ready — and the word that continues after the gun falls silent.