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Take the War to Washington

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Vietnam 1973, and a unit of "expendables" - soldiers convicted of various crimes, looked down upon as black scum and white trash, and lumped together into a fighting unit as insubordinate as it is effective - prepares to withdraw from the country. Resenting their role as cannon fodder, fiercely independent, and blessed with a greater humanity than their bloodthirsty superiors, these five hundred men come to a crossroads. Under the leadership of their commander, Lieutenant Halliday - a wise, caring, yet brilliant officer - they decide that those responsible for a pointless war that devastated a country and corrupted a generation of young American men must be punished.

So begins a new phase of the war - a phase that will shock a complacent America and bring the reality of war to their doorsteps. The men hijack an aircraft carrier and sail it from Vietnam, across the Indian and Atlantic Oceans, all the way to New York. As the ship progresses towards America's East Coast under radio silence, tensions rise in Washington as to the intentions of those on board. Nobody, not the President nor his National Security Advisor, can guess accurately what will happen next.

And when an aircraft carrier loaded with thousands of tons of explosives and weapons arrives in New York with five hundred men bearing deadly intent, the consequences for New York and Washington, the soldiers sent to stop them, and ultimately the leadership of the nation, are deadly.

This book details the campaign of these men in flashback, interspersed between snatches of the Congressional inquiry into Halliday's campaign, and subtly terrifying interrogation of the single man captured alive. A new, totalitarian America reveals itself in the aftermath of the war on Washington, and the point made by Halliday and his men is only proven.

An America obsessed with the artifice of TV and Hollywood, spitting on its veterans even as it demanded ever more blood from them, wrapped up in consumerism, complacency and fear - all is laid bare in this brilliant novel that shows the average grunt on the ground often has a more highly-developed sense of morality than the leaders and citizenry who send them to war.

A must-read.