Cowboy was handsome, flamboyant, courageous, clever, and cruel. He got his nickname from the Green Berets who worked with him in the Highlands of South Vietnam in the 1960s. "You've got to take the bad with the good," one Special Forces captain explained. "And Cowboy is a good interpreter." But he soon fired the interpreter because prisoners did not fare well when Cowboy was around.

And in the end, Cowboy was murdered by his own side, the Montagnard rebels who hated the generals in Saigon as much as the Communists in Hanoi.

The compelling story of a country and a people caught up in a Cold War they couldn't understand, and which in the end would destroy them.