Carr in his last book, Only The Dead, recommends this book. Glad he did. This book is excellent.

If you have only ever seen the movie and it’s your first time reading the book. DONT READ THE INTRODUCTION. Read it after you finish the book. The Introduction has great information about how the book became the movie but it also contains many spoilers including how the book ends. This is a great book and a recommended read.

Storyline and characters are about the same as the movie, But the story is MUCH MUCH BETTER!

Fun read. The cave was so unnerving I had to put the book down for a while to stop an anxiety attack.

This book is written with real urgency. It pushes deeper, past the standard 2 dimensional pulp characters I was expecting. Stallone once said he thought of Rambo as a Zen Frankenstein. The cause and effect of PTSD are on full display here. Monster and creator.

Just Gerat

I saw the movie first. However, I wanted to read the book just to see the differences between the move and the original novel. The book was very different and almost to different stories. I have to say I like the book better.

I would have given 5 stars for the excellent writing in this book. But I took away a star because of the table of contents, which caused me a lot of frustration. First, there are chapters missing. Chapter 14 appears as the first chapter of part 2, and chapter 18 appears as the first chapter of part 3 in the table of contents. However, upon reading, you find that the chapter numbering in reality is not continuous from part to part. That is, each part starts with a chapter 1 and does not simply add 1 to the last chapter of the previous part. Therefore, the table of contents is missing chapters 1-13 (and 14, which I will explain below) of part 2 and chapters 1-17 of part 3. Second, chapter 14 is shown as being in part 2 in the table of contents. But it is really chapter 14 of part 3. Third, the problems listed above cause the wrong number of pages remaining in a chapter to be shown, starting in part 2. All this causes some frustration when trying to go to a certain chapter that is not shown (or is shown incorrectly) in the table of contents. It also makes it hard to pace your reading, when you want to know how many pages are left in a chapter but need to swipe through the chapter to get an accurate page count.

A great story that truly tells the story of the way America was during the Vietnam war.

Great work of fiction and depiction of the clashing cultures in America at the time. Movie does not do it justice.