Valley of Tears — Don Bendell

THE SHATTERING TRUE STORY OF THE SPECIAL FORCES COMBAT MISSION INSIDE THE SUPERHIGHWAY OF THE HO CHI MINH TRAIL.THE PLEI TRAP VALLEY: NVA STRONGHOLD. POW BASE CAMP. NEXUS OF THE HO CHI MINH TRAIL.Guarded by Soviet-made tanks, riddled with deep fortifications, commanded by regiments of well-equipped elite enemy troops, the Plei Trap Valley was called the superhighway of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. So confident of its invulnerability to U.S. assault were the North Vietnamese that they housed a major POW camp beneath its jungle canopy.Acclaimed Special Forces chronicler Don Bendell tells his all-combat true story of the battle for Plei Trap in a blizzard of spent shell casings, with rockets screaming overhead and fog banks of enemy gas rolling in.Virtually unchecked even by B-52 carpet bombing, a swollen torrent of supplies and fresh troops poured out of the valley into the Communist war effort... until a strike force spearheaded by a Special Forces airborne assault team and their one hundred Montagnard strikers dropped deep behind NVA lines.Their mission: to keep retreating NVA from escaping into Cambodia and free American POWs from behind the barbed wire of the NVA camp... at any cost. They paid heavily for the right to call Plei Trap the... VALLEY OF TEARS.ReviewsDon Bendell is one of those writers who has been there and back, and who writes with total authority about the world he knows best. Genuine, basic, honest writing that makes a good read and is accessible and fun.--Asa Baber, Military editor, Playboy magazine