ACCETPED RISK

Forty-Three Men. Seven Days. No Relief Coming.

By: William Ferrier Jr.

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Kontum Province, November 1967. Eleven Americans. Thirty-two Montagnard strikers. One hundred and twenty-eight square kilometers of jungle. No reinforcements coming.

Sergeant Caulfield runs a Special Forces camp on the Cambodian border — what the Army calls an economy-of-force mission: hold the ground with the minimum, accept the risk. His area of responsibility is a red rectangle on acetate. Inside it, an NVA regiment is moving.

When his Kit Carson scout — a former North Vietnamese soldier whose defection the Montagnard tribesmen will never forgive — maps a supply network feeding thousands of enemy troops through the jungle, Caulfield takes his forty-three men and walks toward what's coming.

Observe. Report. Call fire. Do not become decisively engaged.

The jungle has other plans.

Over seven days and three contacts, a squad built from Americans, Montagnard tribesmen, and one man trusted by neither will hold a line the doctrine says cannot be held — with rifles, a mortar, a radio that may or may not reach the firebase, and the kind of courage the field manual describes in a single bloodless phrase.

The men inside it experience it as the distance between a plan and a prayer.

Economy of Force is Book IV in The Vietnam War Collection.

"If Matterhorn is the Vietnam War's War and Peace, Economy of Force is its All Quiet on the Western Front — concentrated, devastating, impossible to put down."

For readers of:
✓ Karl Marlantes (Matterhorn)
✓ James Webb (Fields of Fire)
✓ Tim O'Brien (The Things They Carried)
✓ John Del Vecchio (The 13th Valley)

Features:
✓ Meticulous tactical detail — patrol orders, fire missions, radio procedure
✓ Montagnard and Kit Carson scout perspectives rarely seen in Vietnam fiction
✓ Full military glossary included
✓ Standalone story — no need to read the series in order