THE JUNGLE DOES NOT KNOW YOUR NAME

A Novel of Vietnam's Long Range Reconnaissance Patrols

Six men. Five days. One rule: the enemy never knows you were there.

Vietnam, 1968. Staff Sergeant Dolan Mast leads a six-man Long Range Reconnaissance Patrol into the Dak Kram valley to observe an NVA supply cache and report what he finds. The intelligence estimate says thirty enemy soldiers. From the helicopter, Dolan counts smoke from three separate cooking fires, spaced at tactical intervals. The estimate is wrong by a factor of four.

The mission is simple. Get in. Watch. Get out. Do not fire a shot. Do not leave a trace. Spend five days lying in the dirt forty meters from a hundred and twenty men who will kill you if they hear you breathe.

The mission is not simple.

What Dolan's team writes in a small green notebook will save the lives of every man at a firebase six kilometers away. What the notebook costs them is something the classified report will never contain — and something they will carry home to a country that will never know what they did or why it mattered.

From the sand table where the valley is built in miniature, through the silence of the night movement, to a hardware store in West Virginia where a man holds a bag of nails and cannot find the words — The Jungle Does Not Know Your Name is a novel about the men who were asked to become invisible, who became invisible, and who discovered that the invisibility did not come off.

For readers of Tim O'Brien, Karl Marlantes, and Denis Johnson. A literary Vietnam War novel about silence, precision, and what happens to the men who do the work no one will ever see.