Low and Slow: A Forward Air Controller's Vietnam

Phu Bai, 1967. Captain Holloway flies the Bird Dog low and slow over a jungle that wants to kill him - marking targets for the fast-movers, reading vehicle tracks in morning shadow, keeping a mission log that is supposed to be the truth.It almost always is. Almost.When a recon team goes silent in a valley that isn't supposed to hold what Holloway's rockets found, he has to choose between the report the system will accept and the one that will actually get his men out. What follows is not a battle so much as a paper trail - through an interpreter who reads intercepts more carefully than anyone wants her to, an intelligence officer who believes in process even when process is too slow to matter, and a commanding officer who has spent twenty years learning exactly how much truth an institution can survive hearing at once.Low and Slow is a Vietnam War novel about the war that happens after the shooting stops for the day - in ops shacks and routing folders, in the nine days a report takes to travel from a cockpit to a decision, in the gap between what a man did and what gets filed. For readers of Matterhorn, The Things They Carried, and The Sympathizer, it's a quiet, exacting look at how institutions absorb - and sometimes erase - the cost of the choices made in their name.