Submitted by: Don Himelstein

Category: Books

The B-25 bomber’s engines were on fire from the frontal attack by the Japanese fighter, but co-pilot Robert Halbertson was determined to save his life and his crew from dying in the infinite Indo-Chinese wastelands beneath him.

From the moment Lt. Robert Halbertson managed to crash land his plane without killing his crew in the Indo-Chinese clearing in April of 1945, his life would forever be changed. Finding a way back to civilization he would witness a country at war not only with the Japanese, but also the French and anyone else would try to stop the Vietnamese from their quest for independence.

At the Viet Ming base camp where his crew had been taken Halbertson would meet Dr. Kim, the beautiful Vietnamese doctor who would remain entrenched in his soul. Their love would last 28 years through two destructive wars and finally the Paris Peace Accords.

In the final years of the Vietnam War now Major Gen. Halbertson was on a mission to find a way out of a perpetual conflict that had taken his own son’s life with little to show for it but incessant destruction of young men’s lives and a country that had witnessed uninterrupted war for nearly 30 years.

His own knowledge of the Vietnamese people and the relationships he had built over the years with their military leaders had shown him that these people had not wanted a war but deeply admired and respected American Independence.
Halbertson would find one last great mystery that would come to life with Dr. Kim who had never told him that he had fathered a beautiful, Vietnamese daughter who reminded him of his dead son, and who gave him the strength he needed to bring his world back to life again.

About the author:

Don Himelstein’s first novel was published while he was still working as a Social Security analyst for the New York State Bureau of Disability. His short stories have been published in the Holiday Tales Anthology, the Adelaide Literary Magazine, the Apeiron Review and other publications. He served in the U.S. Army from 1962 to 1964 as a medical corpsman stationed in Europe and was involved in transporting military personal arriving by plane, many on stretchers at Ramstein Air Force Base to the Second General Hospital in Landstuhl, Germany. Having been ordered not to talk with the patients, he and the other members from his unit always wondered where all these wounded had come from since the only place where Americans were at war was in Southeast Asia. The war in Vietnam was still months from being declared with the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, but Himelstein had deep concerns that we were already heavily involved in this war which most Americans neither wanted nor understood. After his discharge he went to school on the Vietnam-era veteran’s bill that allowed him to finish his BA at Richmond College in Staten Island, N.Y.