Days of Valor
The 199th Light Infantry Brigade was created from three U.S. infantry battalions of long lineage as a fast reaction force to place in Vietnam. As the book begins, in December 1967, the brigade has been at war for a year, and many of its battered 12-month men are returning home. The Communists seem to be in a lull, and the brigade commander requests a transfer to a more active sector, just above Saigon. Through January the battalions sense increasing enemy strength, NVA personnel now mixed with Viet Cong units. But the enemy is lying low, and a truce has even been declared for the Vietnamese New Year, the holiday called Tet.
On January 30, 1968, the storm broke loose, as Saigon and nearly every provincial capital was overrun by VC and NVA bursting in unexpected strength from their base camps. In this book we learn the most intimate details of combat, as the Communists fight with rockets, mortars, Chinese claymores, mines, machine guns and AK-47s. The battles evolve into an...