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Year of the Monkey

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Acclaimed as one of the most important novels of the Vietnam War, Year of the Monkey takes us not only into the savage jungles where death waits in every paddyfield and triple canopy, but into the apocalyptic world of political corruption, where friendship and betrayal become unavoidable, where murder and love are common as body counts. It is the gripping story of two American soldiers trapped in a sinister web of cold-blooded murder during the shattering Tet Offensive of 1968. In the poisoned soul of Saigon, Russ Payne is an army journalist partying his nights away when a wild grunt named Willingham is lobbed into his life like a grenade. Willingham, the lone survivor of a Special Forces squad, has been reassigned, inexplicably, to Payne's cushy rear unit. Suddenly Payne's fragile peace is shattered when he's forced to spy on his new friend as part of a secret CIA investigation. On a mind-bending odyssey into the depths of the war-torn jungle, he follows Willingham in his bloody quest to avenge the massacre of his former unit— and discovers a hell of his own. Cutting through an apocalyptic jungle of intrigue, Payne falls in love with a woman who welcomes him into the fold of a Viet Cong camp, witnesses the death of his childhood friend, discovers the horrific meaning of attrition... and ultimately leads to him committing a crime beyond redemption. In stunning scenes of combat and intrigue, we glean as in no other novel or movie the patch-quilt nature of the Vietnamese people and the murderous deceit of sinister body count politics. In the year of the monkey, Payne will come to understand the terrible consequences of following orders— and of ignoring them.

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    • Publisher's Weekly

      January 1, 1989
      In this grim, harshly ambient Vietnam War novel by award-winning journalist and Vietnam veteran Argo, a soldier's court-martial for the apparent murder of his Army buddy serves as the frame for a nightmarish flashback. Soldier Russell Payne is an Army reporter whose life is relatively easy until the appearance of Willingham, a wild, undisciplined enlistee who arrives, seemingly out of nowhere, to join Payne's unit. An internal investigation team wants Payne to foster a friendship with Willingham, whom they say is a survivor of a renegade commander's illegal guerrilla squad. What eventually moves Payne to kill Willingham--a fate made known in the first chapter--serves as the author's hook, and the climactic twist delivered by Argo is both surprising and credible. Argo's Vietnam is very much the one readers and film-goers have come to know in recent years--a pestilent netherworld of inhuman living conditions and impossibly murky moral choices. This unsparing story is an effective confirmation of those portrayals.

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  • English

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