From the moment his first novel was published, Larry Heinemann joined the ranks of the great chroniclers of the Vietnam conflict: Philip Caputo, Tim O’Brien, and Gustav Hasford.

In the stripped-down, unsullied patois of an ordinary soldier, draftee Philip Dosier tells his story of the war. Straight from high school, too young to vote or buy himself a drink, he enters a world of mud and heat, blood and body counts, ambushes and firefights. It is here that he embarks on the brutal downward path to wisdom that awaits every soldier.

In the tradition of The Naked and the Dead and The Thin Red Line, Close Quarters is the harrowing story of how a decent kid from Chicago endures an extraordinary trial and returns profoundly altered to a world on the threshold of change.

Paco Sullivan is the only man in Alpha Company to survive a cataclysmic Vietcong attack on Fire Base Harriette in Vietnam. Everyone else is annihilated. When a medic finally rescues him almost two days later, Paco is waiting to die, flies and maggots covering his burnt, shattered body. He winds up back in the United States with his legs full of pins, daily rations of Librium and Valium, and no sense of what to do next. One evening, on the tail of a rainstorm, he limps off a bus and into the small town of Boone, determined to find a real job and a real bed, but no matter how hard he works, nothing muffles the anguish in his mind and body.

Brilliantly and vividly written, Paco’s Story plunges the reader into the violence and casual cruelty of the Vietnam War and the ghostly aftermath that often dealt the harshest blows.