The Last Ten Days of the Thirty Days Has September saga is a tale of discovery, gained knowledge and many, many lost Marines. It's a tale of a trail of pain, a bloody path through an unforgiving and miserably uncomfortable jungle of animal and plant predators rocked back and forth and up and down by scathing human killers using weapons of unimaginable power and destruction.
These weapons are used to kill other humans but there is nothing sacred about life in the A Shau Valley, as at any moment, any second, any life force can be instantly extinguished no matter how small or large...and yet, also a charnel house where such death can be dragged out for days physically or for fifty years or more mentally.
The Last Ten Days of most of the company's Marine's lives will play out across and through a valley that could have existed in thousands of places over thousands of years. To experience actual combat contact is almost invariably to die while doing so. Soldiers and Marines do not go off into combat as boys and girls to return as men and women...they return in plastic bags, aluminum boxes, or to psychological institutions and clinics.