Frederick Downs

The Killing Zone

"The best damned book from the point of view of the infantrymen who fought there." —Army Times

In 1967 Frederick Downs arrived in Vietnam as a green but determined twenty-three-year-old infantry lieutenant. In the months of brutal combat to follow, Downs was to face the most lethal and loathsome dangers, all the while following orders, keeping his men as safe as he could, and searching for the conviction and then the hope that the war was worth the sacrifice. He would leave with a shattered body, but a spirit still intact. The Killing Zone is his story, and it stands tall with the best books ever written about men in combat.

"Unlike any other Vietnam book I have read . . . Downs has witheld his rage and written a book that is as explicit, as honest, as Ron Kovic's Born on the Fourth of July, but in a completely different way. There is no stridency, no moral to be pondered. 'This is the way it was for us,' he says simply, 'the platoon of Delta One-six.'" —Raphael Sagalyn, The New Republic

"A story every American should read . . . it tells better than has been told before what it is like to fight in Vietnam. . . . To say it is hard to put down is an understatement, and once finished it sticks and burns in the memory, painful, haunting, infuriating, and yet somehow touching and reassuring." —Louisville Courier-Journal

"The author spares neither himself nor the reader in telling it exactly as is was . . . a tribute to the courage and sacrifice of human beings under stress, which must include the author and the men to whom the book is dedicated, and also their enemies." —Washington Post Book World