Rewritten with new information and republished in November of 2019.
1979, Cambodia, Eastern Zone: Two comrades, twelve and fourteen, are running to get away from their unit before the invading Vietnamese kill all of them. They reach the foot of a mountain, and disappear into the jungle. Neither has any food or water. They have no blankets, either, or protective clothing of any kind. They have no matches, no medicine, no maps, no money, no compass, no radio... they don't even know where they are.
But these are the little problems - they have a much bigger one. By getting themselves away from their unit and from the Vietnamese, they've put themselves right in between the two of them. If they can squeeze out, they don't know the terrain and there's no way to get information - it's as though they've escaped to some lost planet. Their plan had been to get back to where they'd last seen their mothers, four years before. But they don't know if anyone in their families is still alive. Only one thing is clear - neither one of them will make it without the other.
The author, Lang Srey, was the younger of the two boys.
From our readers:
"As soon as I opened the book, I was right there on the ground with the two boys."
"What makes this book different is that the focus is not on the horrors of war, but on how the boys mastermind their own survival."
"Not since UNBROKEN have I read a book with such heart and soul."
"I wanted my teenage daughter to understand what Communism is - why we had to leave our country. This book did it."
"A must-read for anyone who served in Southeast Asia. We always wondered what happened to the people we had to leave behind."
"A survival thriller."
The boys had a farmer's machete, a shorter machete, two nylon hammocks, two U.S. GI water cups, two farmers' scarves (folded, under the machetes), and a kerosene lighter for cookfires (the small brass cylinder with the cap). These were their only possessions.
The “X” that the straps of the boys’ Ho Chi Minh sandals made across their ankles and insteps was the reason they had to ditch them – the pattern made them easy to spot, even way back in the jungle. The shoes were army issue, dead giveaway that the boys were deserters.