For the Good of the Many

 Author's Summary

After surviving a helicopter crash during the 1968 Tet offensive in Vietnam, Marine corporal Jason McBride and his fellow survivors are captured and tortured by a sadistic Viet Cong captain. Afterward, orchestrating a harrowing escape, Jason is awarded the Silver Star for bravery. Now, in contemporary America, with the world on the brink of war over dwindling oil supplies, Jason finds that he and his men are being hunted down by the CIA, under orders from the President to get them off the streets, dead or alive. What happened in Vietnam to make Jason, now a rich and powerful attorney, the victim of a nationwide manhunt? Betrayed by the country they sacrificed for, can Jason and his fellow Marines get to the bottom of things before they are killed? Or will they go the way of countless other veterans, caught up in a web of lies and deceit with some of the most powerful men in Washington?

MWSA Review

MWSA 2007 Silver Medal for Fiction, Literary, Military

A Marine in the middle of political intrigue. Author Gary Carter attempts to blend the Marine Corps, Vietnam, lost-and-regained love, politics, and national security in an audacious first novel, and he comes close to putting it all together.

Protagonist Jason McBride finally makes it through boot camp at Camp Pendleton and is immediately shipped off to Vietnam. As a FNG, he and his fellow Marines are quickly captured. McBride helps engineer their escape from a POW camp, and it’s the relationships built here that lay the basis for the underlying story; that the successful post-war McBride is a threat to the president of the United States, who seeks to frame him in a manipulated assassination attempt. McBride reaches back to the knowledge and strengths learned in his Marine and Vietnam days in order to defeat the shadowy government forces arrayed against him.

This has the ability to be a first-rate novel, and with additional character development, tightening up plot details, and attention to technical issues, the author will surely have a superlative second novel.

Reviewed by: Andrew Lubin (2007)