Far From Our Hills

Far From Our Hills is the story of one man's descent into the conflicting values of the Vietnam War, the war that forever-after changed America. The year is 1968. The war in Vietnam is at its height. Luke Tuttle, a young intelligence officer from rural America, is part of a massive effort to stop North Vietnamese supplies moving down the Ho Chi Minh Trail into South Vietnam. He and his crew fly endless hours searching for truck convoys, but the initiative--Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara's famed electronic wall--isn't working. Supplies and men are pouring through. Tet happens. Hue happens. The Battle for Saigon happens. The GI on the ground, the grunt slogging through the rice paddies and the jungles and the mountains, is facing ever-increasing odds, and Luke wants to understand what's going wrong, and somehow, naively, to fix it. Missions--dangerous and futile--provide the bones of the story, and alternate with Luke's life on the ground in wide-open Thailand, where he's stationed, where marijuana is as common as cigarettes and sex beckons. Eventually he meets Lonnie, an American college student home in Bangkok for the summer, who's as opposed to the war as he is. They fall in love and make plans for their future, and it seems like Luke has finally found a safe place. But the ugly reality of the war is inescapable, and inserts itself into the middle of their relationship, and then into his crew, and the results leave him devastated and bitter.