Con Thien: The Hill of Angels

The strength of this book lies in the way that Coan weaves his own combat experience and the official unit documents and histories together with . . . personal combat narratives to form a cohesive whole. He gives a realistic portrayal of the miserable living conditions, the monsoons, the heat during the dry seasons, and finally the futility of the fighting over the same pieces of terrain in the eastern DMZ. . . . It is ironic but perhaps apt that the measure of the war in Vietnam was not the capture of terrain, but body count.--Jack Shulimson, author of U.S. Marines in Vietnam [Coan] makes an important contribution by detailing what occurred at Con Thien from the moment the Marines arrived there in 1966 until the day they left almost three years later. Indeed, some of the battle accounts are superb, conveying a powerful sense of what combat along the DMZ was like.--Peter Maslowski, author of Armed with Cameras: The American Military Photographers of World War II