It's six months since Combined Action Platoon T-9 was established in Hou Bun village. Six months of nearly-nightly battles between the Marines and Popular Forces of CAP Tango Niner and Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army units. The VC and NVA almost always lost those encounters. After months of losing fighters and supply trains, and an inability, despite repeated attempts, to overrun and wipe out Tango Niner, the VC and NVA decided to take their operations elsewhere. Peace had come to Hou Bun village.

But there was one more thing the Marines had to do. Two years earlier, the VC had kidnapped the son of Phao Houng, the PF platoon commander. Houng found out where his son was being held as a slave laborer. Five Marines and one PF go on a mission to rescue the boy. It's one of the most audacious and dangerous missions ever undertaken by Americans in the war: Nine-year-old Phao Kha Ai was being held in the A Shau Valley, one of the strongest VC and NVA bases in South Vietnam.

The Marines and PFs of CAP T-9 couldn't pull it off totally by themselves, they needed help. They got it from Chief Petty Officer Ossie Slover, the cousin of Tango Niner's Corporal "Big Louie" Slover; from Bobbie Harder, a civilian employee of the Marines in Da Nang--and girlfriend of Tango Niner's Corporal "Tex" Randall; from Ensign Lily, a navy friend of Second Lieutenant "Scrappy" Burrison, Tango Niner's commanding officer; and from Lieutenant (j.g.) Reeves, a helicopter pilot and friend of Lily's.

It's a bodacious and outrageous mission, that can only be pulled off by a small team of determined Marines and PFs, and their friends who supported them.