True North

In 1962, Australian Army adviser Lieutenant Jack Burns is deployed as part of 'The Team' to the Mekong Delta, the hotspot of the Vietnam War, where he is teamed up with Lt. Colonel John Paul Vann and about to undergo the ultimate test of his convictions. As Jack is honing his craft in the Delta, Tran, a teenage soldier girl with the North Vietnamese Army makes her way down the Ho Chi Minh Trail and into the Delta, where she must stare down the might of US firepower at the Battle of Ap Bac. In a war without frontlines, Jack and Tran must fight to survive in the most dangerous place in the world - South Vietnam. A love story set against the traumascape of the Vietnam War, True North is a page turner that HALO drops the reader into the contested paddy fields and the viscous military swamp that was Vietnam divided between the corrupt Diem regime in the South and a ruthless communist-cum-nationalist fanaticism in the North. And with Big Brother American raging like some crippled giant, an Ozymandias of the Mekong Delta. More than that, the readers sees the conflict through the vulnerable eyes of an Australian adviser to the South, and a fighter from the North who just happens to be a beautiful young women. The reader travels with the two protagonists, Jack and Tran, separately and together through some of the most harrowing events of the first years of the war. Vietnam itself is evoked with an authority that is certain to engage the reader, and the battle scenes are so powerful that images remain long after the reader has returned the book to its place among the most memorable in their collection. The subject of the novel – the early Australian and American interventions in what became the Vietnam War – is a complex and contentious one that has rarely been tackled beyond military explanations. True North provides many insights into the geo-political, economic and religious drivers to the war. A novel for the readers of military non-fiction and non-war buffs alike, True North has maturity of structure, characterisation and expression and provides great perspective and insight into the effect of war on those directly involved. True North is resolved in a manner that is not only courageous it is beautifully symbolic at both the historical and personal levels of the narrative. It is unexpected and unsettling, and captures well the tangled web the Americans and Australians were wading into in 1963.