Sergeant Dickinson is the 05-Bravo -- the radioman -- of a Special Forces A Team in the Central Highlands of Vietnam in the mid-sixties.The camp is encircled and attacked for nine days by the North Vietnamese Army, anxious to lure large American forces into combat for the first time. He survives, just. The remnants of the team are broken up, the soldiers scattered among other commands. A unit that battered, goes the thinking, can't be put back together. Can he?The war grows ever larger and darker, but Dickinson has the clarity of a person who has been shot at, "the almost dying and then not dying. Afterwards is the best thing there is".There are a handful of them -- Men Without Women, A Walk in the Sun -- small, stunning books about men and war.

Sergeant Dickinson, says Nelson DeMille, is one of those "classics".