Cat Quiet (LRRP Rangers Vietnam Book 4)

Cat Quiet is a single chapter in a larger work entitled, Gonna Stick My Sword in the Golden Sand: a Vietnam Soldier's Story. With striped face paint and tiger fatigues, four LRRPs creep through the jungle. Cat quiet stealth is their only ally, allowing them to achieve their goal: a safe perch on a mountainside plateau from which they can maintain a lookout over a vast valley in the mountains of Vietnam's central highlands, but the idyllic scene is not as it seems.

Golden Sand is a bold, dark, and intense retelling of the Vietnam experience through the eyes of an army scout, the point man of Romeo-18, a camouflaged and face-painted four-man LRRP team inserted by helicopter into remote and unfriendly territory to search for "Charlie," the North Vietnamese soldiers who travelled the mountain gullies of the Ho Chi Minh trail.

Golden Sand is less about patriotism and heroism than about the gut-wrenching reality for the Vietnam combat soldiers who are celebrated for simply doing their best to get by, not as superheroes, but as young men who often acted heroically but sometimes foolishly in circumstances not of their own choosing. One reviewer commented, "the bond and the folly of immortal combat ring loud and clear from the page, and the story's told with all the realism, language and pathos of experience." The mood of Golden Sand is dark and somber rather than triumphalistic: a hauntingly honest and brutally true retelling rather than a glorification of the Vietnam experience.

The author refers to Golden Sand as "autobiographical fiction." True incidents serve as inspiration for the book, but the stories are told with literary embellishment. The author served with K Company, 75th Infantry (Rangers) in the central highlands of Vietnam in 1969-70, and he was twice awarded a bronze star for valor in combat.