True North by Roger Rooney

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 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. The subject of the novel – the early Australian and American interventions in what became the Vietnam War – is a complex and contentious one that few writers have tackled. The reader experiences 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 woman. Vietnam itself is evoked with an authority that is certain to engage the reader, and the battle scenes are powerful and True North is resolved in a manner that is courageous and beautifully symbolic at both the historical and personal levels of the narrative.