The Incessant Voice of War

The Incessant Voice of War: The Black Rose Conspiracies is a novel, a fictional tale rooted in the wartime realities of Vietnam, circa 1968, as seen through the eyes of Roger Burnett, an Australian/American journalist wandering the war zone on assignment by the Asia-Pacific World Herald. The story begins simply enough when Burnett mentions, in a dispatch cover letter to J. Douglas Greene, his editor/publisher in Brisbane, that he was about to begin research on something that had made verbal rounds during his month-long stint at the Khe Sanh Firebase in the Central Highlands: the rumor that ‘tactical nukes’ were soon to fall into the hands of the North Vietnamese. Burnett noted that the alleged operation’s whispered codename was Black Rose, but that was all he had so far. A scant twenty-four hours later, he was back in Brisbane at Greene’s request, and awaiting a meeting at APWH headquarters.

And therein lies the beginning of a saga, the unfolding story of a deeply embedded wartime conspiracy accidentally come into conflict with a random assemblage of multi-national civilians who slowly, through clever use of every resource available to them, ferret out the details and as they do so, develop the means to counter and perhaps even defeat their adversaries. But the conflict is only a portion of the story. Far greater is the emergent exploration amongst the protagonists of expansive values such as honor, truth, tolerance, and love, concepts which clearly are both alien and anathema to their dark-sided counterparts.