This is the 40th Anniversary Edition of the 1972 novel upon which the Academy Award-winning, Jane Fonda, Vietnam War film of the same name was loosely based. It has maintained a following over the years, in part, because it captures the physical and psychological landscape of the war zone and home front during the Vietnam War. In the Introduction to an edition published 10 years later, Mel Watkins of the New York Times Book Review wrote: “George Davis wrote a novel that stripped away the transient political pieties with which the issue of Vietnam was too often laden and provided a deeper. . . more lasting revelation” In the Book Review, Peter Rand called it “our war novel.” In The Nation, Jerry Bryant wrote: “this is one of the few novels I have read recently in which I have faintly perceived a subliminal stirring. I wonder what George Davis will produce next.” Davis has authored other books and much journalism in a style which he calls “holistic realism,” the idea that we have not only a physical but a spiritual existence. In his works, readers experience the movement of spirits as “subliminal stirring.” The experience began in this landmark action novel that is alive now as it was 40 years ago.
