Fields of Fire

Name: Fields of Fire
Rating: 4.4 (3356 reviews)

by James H. Webb

First published 1978

Amazon

4.4(3,356)

In 1969 three very different young Marines arrive in Vietnam carrying their own ambitions, assumptions and inherited ideas about courage. Goodrich comes from Harvard, Snake has embraced the Corps before he fully understands it, and Hodges is burdened by a family tradition of military service. In the An Hoa Basin they enter a landscape of patrols, ambushes, exhaustion and sudden violence where the abstractions of the war give way to the immediate demands of keeping one another alive.

As the platoon is worn down by combat, the men discover how fear, loyalty, brutality and affection can exist side by side. Webb moves among officers and enlisted Marines without romanticising either the war or the bonds it creates, showing how combat strips away old identities while creating new obligations that may endure long after the fighting ends. Fields of Fire is a Vietnam War novel about young men transformed by battle and by the people beside them.