Never Vanquished: A Novel of the Vietnam War - Paperback

by Douglas Young (Author)

He went back to Vietnam to finish a war. He stayed to fight a different one.

It is January 1972, and the United States is walking away from Vietnam. Captain DeAndre Washington - Silver Stars, Purple Heart, third tour - is not. Assigned as an advisor to the 11th Battalion of the South Vietnamese Rangers near Kon Tum, he lands expecting a year of paperwork, radios, and restraint. What he finds instead is a country in free fall, a South Vietnamese command rotten with corruption and ethnic hatred, and a people the world is about to forget: the Jarai.

The Montagnards - the "Dega" - are the Christian hill tribes of the Central Highlands. They fought and bled for the Americans. They are despised by the Vietnamese on both sides of the war. And DeAndre, a first-generation college graduate from segregated Georgia, understands them at a level he never expected. When he falls in love with Chel - a Jarai woman of uncommon strength - the arc of his life bends away from the Army and toward a cause Washington has already decided to abandon.

From the siege of Kon Tum during the 1972 Easter Offensive, to a staged "capture" that lets him vanish into the jungle, to his years with FULRO - the Dega resistance army hunted across three countries - Never Vanquished follows DeAndre and Chel across three decades of love, war, exile, and faith. It sweeps from Vietnamese longhouses to Cambodian jungle camps to the Montagnard refugee community of North Carolina, and finally back to the highlands where the fight was never truly finished.

Inside this novel:

• A decorated Black officer's unlikely second life as a tribal warrior in a war America pretends is over
• A tender, hard-won cross-cultural romance set against genocide and occupation
• The true-to-history story of FULRO, the Jarai, and the missionary families who stood with them
• The Battle of Kon Tum, the fall of Saigon, and the bitter decades that followed
• The resettlement of Montagnard refugees in North Carolina - and the fight that followed them

Drawn from history and shaped by the author's two tours as an infantry officer in Vietnam and years of friendship with the Montagnard people, Never Vanquished is a novel for readers of Matterhorn, A Bright Shining Lie, and The Things They Carried - a story of honor, love, and the allies America left behind.

The war ended. Their war didn't.