A Tiger among Us

March 26, 2018
The heart of Adkins’s Vietnam War memoir is a blow-by-blow account of a vicious, four-day battle in 1966 in the densely forested and notoriously dangerous A Shau Valley. During his second tour, Adkins and his fellow Special Forces team members—along with Montagnard fighters and South Vietnamese Army Special Forces troops—battled a North Vietnamese Army infantry division that outnumbered them 10 to one. The Americans and their allies suffered heavy casualties at the hands of the NVA, who had help from the Viet Cong and some of the Green Berets’ own indigenous fighters, who turned against them. Adkins fought ferociously and fearlessly, killing scores of enemy troops, sustaining several wounds, and leading the other survivors to safety—all against almost unimaginable odds. He belatedly received the Medal of Honor (in 2014) for his extreme courage under fire. Though the prose is plain and undistinguished, the book will be of interest to those seeking tales of the hell combatants went through in Vietnam.