Don't Mean Nuthin'
A Military Thriller
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
An assassin enacts revenge in a country melting in napalm ooze and madness.
Frank Morgan, a young college grad raised on Army discipline, started his military career as a Phoenix Program assassin in Vietnam with nothing but faith, confidence, and belief in his country. In 1969, he boards the Freedom Bird and takes a seat next to a grizzled grunt. This is Morgan’s first hint of what may be coming his way—and what he, as a soldier, may become.
Throughout his tour, Morgan struggles with his belief in his missions, though he pushes on and does his job. With less than a month to go before he heads home, Morgan leads a squad of South Vietnamese special forces in a massacre and mistakenly kills a beautiful innocent woman, Liem, in an old French plantation outside C?n Tho.
The death of Liem haunts him and distracts him so that he barely survives an attempt on his own life—which he later learns was ordered by his CIA chief, a swashbuckling cowboy named Comer. This betrayal launches Morgan’s metamorphosis into an avenging assassin.
Don’t Mean Nuthin’ reveals a war-torn Vietnam through a Conradian journey by a man who seeks a higher moral ground and then struggles to redeem himself in a sea of carnage and despair.
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PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Lealos highlights the ugliness of the Vietnam War in general, and the Phoenix program in particular, in this searing thriller focused on an American soldier, Frank Morgan (aka the Night Snake), who, in 1970, became a legendary assassin in Vietnam. (In 2014's Pashtun, a CIA assassin in Afghanistan assumes the name of Frank Morgan in honor of the Frank Morgan of this tale, which was originally published as an e-book in 2008.) Reporting only to a man nicknamed the Viper, Morgan and a Montagnard scout, Luc Luong, carry out orders to target key enemies, including beautiful Sorbonne-educated Liem Tran, reputed to be an important Vietcong cadre chief and the mistress of Jimmy Ky, Vice President Ky's son. "Don't Mean Nuthin' " is Morgan's mantra, but Tran's death hits him hard, and he vows to get the man he holds responsible Jimmy. Readers should be prepared for frequent killing, often preceded by rape and torture, in this grim take on events in wartime Vietnam.