BELOW

From the author of the Vietnam War novel, Brown Water

A literary novel about the tunnel rats of Vietnam. Until now.

Cu Chi, November 1967. The tunnels run for two hundred miles beneath the red dirt of South Vietnam-three levels deep, carved by hand, invisible from the surface. The Viet Cong live in them, fight from them, vanish into them. The U.S. Army sends men down to find them.

Earle Cain is one of those men. A coal miner's son from Virginia, he carries a .45 pistol and a flashlight into tunnels so narrow he cannot turn around. Fourteen inches wide. Twenty inches high. Absolute dark. He checks his weapon the same way every time-magazine, chamber, safety-and he goes down.

Nguyen Thi Lan is a nurse in the underground hospital on the third level. She treats the wounded by candlelight with no anesthesia and no resupply. She has not seen the sky in four months.

As the war builds toward the Tet Offensive of January 1968, their worlds move toward a collision that neither can see coming-one descending, one waiting below. Men disappear. The tunnels do not give them back.

Set during the most harrowing chapter of the Vietnam War, BELOW is a novel about what happens beneath the surface-beneath the ground, beneath the skin, beneath the history we think we know.

For readers of Matterhorn, The Things They Carried, and The Women.