The Old Man's Trail; A Novel About the Vietcong
Annapolis, Maryland: Naval Institute Press, 1995. First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. xv, [3], 224, [6] pages. Endpaper maps. Includes Acknowledgments, Vietnamese Expressions, Historical Note, and Prologue. Chapters cover Send-Off; The Old Man's Trail; Monsoon Strategy; The Treacherous Maze; Opium Trails; Cambodia; Rumors; Enclave; Convoy; Escape; Spectre; Grail; The Golden BB; Hornets' Nest; Bureaucrats; Responsibility; Power; Rewards; "Spend Blood'; and Eulogies. A former U.S. Marine and a veteran of the Vietnam War offers a empathetic, fictional portrait of the Vietcong, tracing the brutal journey of a platoon of teenaged Vietnamese boys down the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The enemy is a platoon of fifteen-year-old boys ordered to carry more than a ton of cargo down a primitive network of trails and roads known to the Vietnamese as the Old Man's Trail but called the Ho Chi Minh Trail in the West. This is a tale of courage, motivation, survival, love, teamwork, and one man's determination to survive. For Campbell, Duan is the personification of the Vietnamese patriot and soldier--a soldier first, a nationalist second, a tacit Communist third. And the author believes that it was men like Duan who drove the world's most powerful nation from Vietnam in 1975. Tom Campbell is a retired Marine Colonel who is an award winning senior Lecturer in management and leadership at the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin. While on active duty he was an advisor... a covan... to the Vietnamese Marines for seventeen months, and commanded two platoons, two companies and two battalions. More